Abstract
Wind information is one of the major inputs for the prediction of urban air flow using computational fluid dynamic (CFD) models. Therefore, the numerical characteristics of the wind data formed at their mother domains should be clarified to predict the urban air flow more precisely. In this study, the formation characteristics of the wind data in the Seoul region were used as the inlet wind information for a CFD based simulation and were analyzed using numerical weather prediction models for weather research and forecasting (WRF). Because air flow over the central part of the Korean peninsula is often controlled not only by synoptic scale westerly winds but also by the westerly sea breeze induced from the Yellow Sea, the westerly wind often dominates the entire Seoul region. Although simulations of wind speed and air temperature gave results that were slightly high and low, respectively, their temporal variation patterns agreed well with the observations. In the analysis of the vertical cross section, the variation of wind speed along the western boundary of Seoul is simpler in a large domain with the highest horizontal resolution as compared to a small domain with the same resolution. A strong convergence of the sea breeze due to precise topography leads to the simplification of the wind pattern. The same tendency was shown in the average vertical profiles of the wind speed. The difference in the simulated wind pattern of two different domains is greater during the night than in the daytime because of atmospheric stability and topographically induced mesoscale forcing.
