The increased traffic emissions and reduced ventilation of urban street canyons lead to the formation of high particle concentrations as a function of the related flow field and geometry. In this context, the use of advanced modelling tools, able to evaluate particle concentration under different traffic and meteorological conditions, may be helpful. In this work, a numerical scheme based on th...

Rapidly expanding desert populations have significantly altered surface microclimatic conditions. These modifications are evident for much of the year, since desert areas are frequently affected by stable, clear, calm weather. Past empirical analyses of urban effects for Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona, have highlighted the large magnitude of the “urban heat island effect” with minimum temperatures...

We prove that completing an untimed, unbounded track in TrackMania Nations Forever is NP-complete by using a reduction from 3-SAT and showing that a solution can be checked in polynomial time.

Rows of tall buildings can create a unique urban habitat known as a street canyon. These canyons trap traffic pollutants, limiting their dispersal into the atmospheric boundary layer that extends as high as 2,000 meters above the ground. A new study suggests that vegetation in street canyons may reduce air-pollutant concentrations much more than previously reported and suggests innovative plant...

Today, GPS is the most popular and widely used threedimensional positioning technology in the world. However, in many everyday environments such as indoors or in urban areas, GPS signals are not available for positioning (due to the very weak signals). Even with high sensitivity GPS receivers, positioning for urban and indoor environments cannot be guaranteed in all situations, and accuracies a...

Urban land–atmosphere interactions can be captured by numerical modeling framework with coupled land surface and atmospheric processes, while the model performance depends largely on accurate input parameters. In this study, we use an advanced stochastic approach to quantify parameter uncertainty and model sensitivity of a coupled numerical framework for urban land–atmosphere interactions. It i...