Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

My long-term research program is concerned with understanding the dynamics of the wind near to the ground, particularly the relationship between large and small spatial and temporal scales, and their impact on buildings and structures, as well as on those living in urban areas. The need to understand the interactions between person-scale winds at ground level and the weather events that produce them is becoming ever more urgent due to the variability in the occurrence and severity of severe storms associated with climate change and the increasing urbanization globally that is leading to health problems associated with poor air quality. The significance of my proposed research is that I will develop novel tools to obtain and analyze wind climate data over a wide scale range to derive relatively simple and robust models that represent these wind dynamics which may then be used to predict their effects. The impact of this research will be achieved through my experience in wind engineering and fluid mechanics, supported by international collaborations featuring the expertise of a severe storms meteorologist (L Orf, USA) and an expert in urban wind flows (L Perret, France). The research encompasses two short term projects; (i) the development of novel realistic models to represent the damaging, vortex-dominated, winds associated with supercell storms, in particular tornadoes, utilizing world-leading, large-scale, supercomputer simulations of complete tornado-producing supercell thunderstorms at very high spatial (10 m) and temporal (0.2 s) resolution that can capture very find details of the storm and (ii) the development of models to describe the complex wind flow in urban streets canyons and how it interacts dynamically, in space and time, with the larger scale winds above in the oncoming atmospheric boundary layer as well as in the wakes of surrounding large buildings that form part of a real urban canopies. This project will use wind tunnel experiments of the turbulent wind flow over small models representing urban topographies at 1:200 scale and computational fluid dynamics simulations of such topographies, together with data-driven model identification techniques and data-assimilation methods to develop a model to describe the flow dynamics. The benefits of my research are that the resulting models will more completely represent the physics of the real wind, compared to existing models, without sacrificing simplicity, and so they should provide more reliable results when applied to analyses of tornado wind loads on buildings and structures or the estimation of pollutant levels in urban street canyons, for example. The new knowledge and associated tools gained through this research will also benefit Canada, especially the heavily populated industrial heartland of Southern Ontario, which regularly experiences tornadoes and has dense urban areas susceptible to poor air quality.