Multiscale modeling of the atmospheric environment over a forest canopy

Vegetation constitutes one of the fundamental types of land use on Earth. The presence of trees in urban areas can decrease local winds and exchange sensible and latent heat with the surrounding environments, thus exerting notable influences on the urban microenvironment. A better understanding of the turbulent transfer of momentum and scalars around vegetation canopy could significantly contribute to improvement of the urban environment. This work develops a large-eddy simulation (LES) method that is applicable to model the flow and scalar transport over the forest canopy. We study the atmospheric flow over complex forested areas under typical weather conditions by coupling LES to the mesoscale model. Models of radiation and energy balance have been developed with explicit treatment of the vegetation canopy. By examining the flow over a forest canopy under a range of stability conditions, we found that buoyancy enhances or suppresses turbulent mixing in unstable or stable atmosphere respectively, with decreasing or increasing wind shear, respectively. From the multiscale modeling of the Beijing Olympic Forest Park, the present coupling scheme proves to better resolve the diurnal variations in wind speed, temperature, and relative humidity over complex urban terrains. The coupling scheme is superior to the traditional mesoscale model in terms of wind field simulation. This is mainly because the coupling scheme not only takes the influences of external mesoscale flow into consideration, but also resolves the heterogeneous urban surface at a fine scale by downscaling, thus better reproducing the complex flow and turbulent transport in the urban roughness sublayer.