Interactions of lower atmosphere dynamics and chemistry with the built environment

Abstract:

Adaptation to climate change and increasing urbanization are two of the main challenges for modern societies. Effective recommendations for action to protect people's health and the environment require the use of accurate planning tools. This can be achieved by means of Large Eddy Simulation (LES) models that permit to resolve all relevant scales of turbulent motion, so that these simulations can capture the inherent unsteadiness of interactions between the atmospheric flow and the built environment. In addition, emission, dispersion, chemical transformation and removal of air pollutants in the urban canopy layer need to be included in these fine-scale numerical simulations that can explicitly resolve 3D building structures, surface heat fluxes at building facades, street canyons and terrain variations. However, LES models are so far barely applied for urban air quality studies, in particular chemical transformation of pollutants. A new state-of-the-art urban microscale model, PALM-4U, has been developed that includes both gas-phase and aerosol chemistry. The structure of this model will be explained and selected results of a case study for the city of Berlin will be presented.


Bio: 

Matthias Mauder is professor of meteorology at Technische Universität Dresden, Germany, since 2021. His research interests lie in the areas of energy balance at the Earth's surface, greenhouse gas balances of ecosystems and air quality in cities. Prof. Mauder studied environmental sciences at the University of Bayreuth, where he received his doctorate at the Department of Micrometeorology in 2006. After a three-year post-doctoral phase at a research institute in Canada, he returned to Germany and works as a senior scientist at the Institute for Meteorology and Climate Research - Atmospheric Environmental Research at the Karlsruhe Institute for Meteorology in Garmisch-Partenkirchen between 2009 and 2021. Since 2012, he has been head of the research group "Transport Processes in the Atmospheric Boundary Layer", doing research on fundamentals of boundary layer meteorology and biosphere-atmosphere interactions in climate change.

Summary: