The implementation of land use and relief height data in predicting the evolution of the atmospheric boundary-layer within the urban environment

It is vitally important to understand the structure of the atmospheric boundary-layer within the urban environment and the local rural surroundings. Within the local environment the structure of the earth’s boundary-layer is highly turbulent and diffusive, with distinctive inner and outer regions. The flow in the inner region is mainly influenced by the physical characteristics of the terrain, such as the relief and the land use, whereas in the outer region larger scale phenomena need to be taken into account. In this paper, novel methods are implemented to understand the structure of the atmospheric boundary-layer within the urban environment. These include a technique that allows the larger scale topographical effects on the atmospheric boundary-layer to be incorporated, yet still enabling fine resolution of the boundary-layer within the smaller scale of the urban environment. This is achieved by manipulating two large data sets for the land use and the relief height within the UK in conjunction with sophisticated mathematical modelling. In this paper a simple but effective algorithm is presented that allows these large data sets to be practically implemented within the framework of an atmospheric boundary-layer fluid flow model.