Cities are diverse places with heterogeneous landscapes and are home to complex processes occurring over a wide range of length and time scales. Understanding and modeling these process is critical to improved sustainability related to goals of improving urban microclimate, reducing energy and water usage, increasing clean energy production and mitigating pollution emissions. Due to difficulty in simulating the large disparity in length scales covering these processes, little is known about their impact. In this resentation, a description of our approach, which is designed to bridge these scales and improve our understanding of different processes occurring in urban environments at local (neighborhood), city, and meso-scales will be discussed. In particular, an overview of the fast-response QUIC EnvSimmodel will be presented along with recent model additions designed to resolved vegetation and mountainous terrain. QUIC EnvSimpredicts winds, dispersion, radiation components, air temperatures and humidity at scales of 1-5 meters. A discussion will be presented on how this modeling system can be extended to other applications related to winds and microclimate in complex (e.g., mountainous) terrain such as fires at the wildland urban interface.

This webinar was presented as part of the RMRS Fire Sciences Laboratory's weekly seminar series for 2017-2018.