Application of CFD Technique on Micro-Scale Issues in Urban Climatic Environment Researches in China

Covering such aspects as urban wind environment, urban thermal environment and air pollution, the application of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technique is reviewed on the micro-scale issues in urban climatic environment researches in China. Through the review it is found that when urban climatic environment researches focus on the urban neighborhood scale and focus on the phenomena within the urban canopy layer, CFD technique has special capabilities in describing complex geometries and provides the details of thermal, dynamic and diffusion processes within the urban blocks, which cannot be realized by mesoscale models. Generally speaking, the initiation of researches in this field in China is relatively late, but the progress made over the last 20 years is quite rapid and the achievements in this field are quite productive due to the strong demand inspired by the rapid urbanization process of China. In the future, along with the improvement of the capability of high performance computer, it is expected that CFD technique will be applied in many operational jobs, such as atmospheric environment forecasting, wind shear forecasting in airports and wind energy assessment.