Recent Trends and Remaining Limitations in Urban Microclimate Models

Abstract

Problems such as natural ventilation, pollutant dispersion, changes in wind environments, and urban heat is-lands are gaining increasing prominence in both public concern and research. In response, urban microclimate modelling researchers are continually striving to develop new strategies to rapidly and inexpensively generate more accurate results. Numerical modelling is a common way to address these concerns. However, to generate realistic results requires signifi-cant investment in model creation, especially with respect to the detail to which a model is populated. This paper provides an overview about this and other recent trends within the research community by considering nearly 100 recent papers. Findings show that despite more computational capacity there has not been a major trend towards increasing the model complexity to obtain more realistic results.