Data portal · Methods
Urban flow datasets by method
The same urban flow problem looks different from a rooftop mast, a wind tunnel and a supercomputer. These pages group the catalogue by how the data were produced.
-
Wind-tunnel and water-flume datasets for urban flow
37 resources
Physical-model experiments on flow and dispersion around scaled buildings and city models, made in atmospheric boundary-layer wind tunnels and water flumes. Expect PIV and hot-wire velocity data, pressure coefficients and tracer concentrations measured under controlled inflow conditions; many are standard validation cases for CFD.
-
Urban field campaign datasets: measurements in real cities
97 resources
Measurements made outdoors in real cities: intensive observation campaigns, long-running tall-tower and rooftop flux sites, Doppler lidar and radiosonde profiles, tracer releases and dense networks of weather stations. They capture the full complexity of urban weather and are the reference against which models are judged.
-
Large-eddy simulation (LES) datasets of urban flow
58 resources
Output from large-eddy simulations of flow, heat and pollutant transport over idealised building arrays and real neighbourhoods. LES resolves the energetic turbulent eddies, so these datasets typically provide instantaneous and time-averaged fields, turbulence statistics and canopy-averaged profiles; many include the geometry and input files needed to rerun them.
-
Direct numerical simulation (DNS) datasets of urban-like flows
3 resources
Direct numerical simulations resolve every scale of turbulence, which limits them to moderate Reynolds numbers and simple geometries such as cube arrays and rough walls. In return they give exact reference statistics for studying flow over urban-like roughness and for testing LES, wall models and parameterisations.
-
RANS CFD datasets and case set-ups for urban flow
32 resources
Reynolds-averaged (RANS) CFD solutions and case set-ups for wind and dispersion around buildings and across districts. RANS is the workhorse of engineering practice for pedestrian-wind and air-quality assessments; these entries include steady flow fields, parametric studies and training data for surrogate models.
-
Mesoscale and urban climate model datasets
35 resources
Output and input data for weather and climate models that represent the city through an urban canopy scheme, such as WRF with urban physics and other regional models. Includes city-scale temperature and wind fields, urban climate projections, and the land-cover and morphology data these models need.
-
Machine-learning and surrogate model datasets for urban flow
18 resources
Datasets built to train and test machine-learning surrogates of urban wind, dispersion and microclimate, together with trained models and code. Most pair large ensembles of CFD or LES runs with the geometry that produced them, so that models can be fitted and compared on common data.