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Flow over Hills: A Large-Eddy Simulation of the Bolund Case

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Abstract

Simulation of local atmospheric flows around complex topography is important for several applications in wind energy (short-term wind forecasting and turbine siting and control), local weather prediction in mountainous regions and avalanche risk assessment. However, atmospheric simulation around steep mountain topography remains challenging, and a number of different approaches are used to represent such topography in numerical models. The immersed boundary method (IBM) is particularly well-suited for efficient and numerically stable simulation of flow around steep terrain. It uses a homogenous grid and permits a fast meshing of the topography. Here, we use the IBM in conjunction with a large-eddy simulation (LES) and test it against two unique datasets. In the first comparison, the LES is used to reproduce experimental results from a wind-tunnel study of a smooth three-dimensional hill. In the second comparison, we simulate the wind field around the Bolund Hill, Denmark, and make direct comparisons with field measurements. Both cases show good agreement between the simulation results and the experimental data, with the largest disagreement observed near the surface. The source of error is investigated by performing additional simulations with a variety of spatial resolutions and surface roughness properties.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the collaborators who participated in the Bolund Experiment and provided us with the data for comparison. We are also grateful to the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) for the use of their computers. We would like to thank the Swiss National Science Foundation for their financial support under grant 200021-120238. Mary Parlange provided great assistance with english ameliorations. Finally, we thank the reviewers for their valuable suggestions in improving this article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, 1015 , Lausanne, Switzerland

    Marc Diebold, Jiannong Fang & Marc B. Parlange

  2. Department of Biological and Ecological Engineering, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, 97331, USA

    Chad Higgins

  3. Department of Wind Energy, Technical University of Denmark, 4000 , Roskilde, Denmark

    Andreas Bechmann

Authors
  1. Marc Diebold
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  2. Chad Higgins
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  3. Jiannong Fang
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  4. Andreas Bechmann
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  5. Marc B. Parlange
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Correspondence to Marc Diebold.

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Diebold, M., Higgins, C., Fang, J. et al. Flow over Hills: A Large-Eddy Simulation of the Bolund Case. Boundary-Layer Meteorol 148, 177–194 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10546-013-9807-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10546-013-9807-0

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