Modeling wind flow over complex urban terrain

The damage done to buildings by meteorologic disturbances and their aftermaths, like wind-storms or flooding, is a major issue regarding entity insurance policies. While the functional model enabling the estimation of floodwater damage is well-known and accurate, an equivalent concerning storms and winter-gales is non-existent. As state-of-the-art scientific findings revealed that the damage caused by intense winds strongly correlates to the local wind speed, the aim of this work is to model wind flow over an urban area to detect peaks concerning wind speed and air pressure gradients. The necessary prerequisites for wind modeling are a) a surface model and b) information about surface roughness. In this experiment this information is derived from data products delivered by remote sensing satellite missions, namely Cartosat-1 and RapidEye. The experiments were carried out for a subset of the city of Gelsenkirchen in Westphalia, Germany, covering 1500*1500 m
²
. The major steps described are a) the mesh generation from DSM, b) enrichment of the DSM with surface roughness parameters based on landuse data, c) running the modeling for the area of interest and d) analysis of the results. The experiment reveals that the given data sources satisfy the necessary accuracy for modeling channeling and deflection effects in urban environments.