The goal of this paper is to present bluff body flow and transport from steady point sources of pollutants, or chemical and biological agents in an idealized urban environment This paper includes ventilation behavior in different street canyon configurations. To evaluate dispersion in a model urban street canyon, a series of tests with various street canyon aspect ratios (B=H) are presented. Bo...

In 2005 The UK Department for Trade and Industry (DTI) commenced funding a project called Visualising Integrated Information on Buried Assets to Reduce Streetworks (VISTA). The project aims to precisely map buried assets (gas pipes, telecom cables, etc) and increase the efficiency of the process in challenging environments such as in urban canyons, where GPS fails to work or is not reliable eno...

This research evaluates the quality of GPS signals and their usability for localization in urban environments. GPS signals collected on a Software Defined Radio (SDR) platform in urban canyons in Columbus, Ohio (USA) are processed using a deeply integrated GPS/INS scheme. This architecture allows for coherent signal integration with continuous carrier phase tracking for intervals as long as one...

Recently the world’s population demographics crossed an important threshold: more people now live in urban than in rural areas (UN 2006). Projections show that the urbanization continues at a significant rate of ~ 1.5% per year, presenting difficult challenges of providing basic needs such as clean air, water and security for urban dwellers while managing available resources efficiently. In thi...

A fundamental part of studying human mobility is to detect dwelling. When we dwell we are not necessarily stationary, but move around in a confined area. Most of our significant places are indoors, which hampers the detection using GPS. In this work, we discuss three different sensor sources when used for dwelling detection in urban environments: GPS, Wi-Fi and geolocation. Our study is based o...

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...

wind is the carrier of pollutants and any other gaseous or particle matters in the atmosphere. stable atmosphere with low wind provides favorable conditions for high contamination of pollutants in urban areas. the importance of mesoscale atmospheric flows in air pollution dispersion has been recognized in the past three decades and has been the focus of intensive research; both observational an...