MOSAIK - Model-based city planning and application in climate change
Summary
MOSAIK is a BMBF funded German-wide research project within the call "Stadtklima im Wandel" (urban climate under change, [UC]²) that aims at developing a new modern and highly-efficient UCM. Within [UC]² four joint research projects with overall 30 subprojects work on three modules: model development (module A, MOSAIK), observational data (module B, 3DO) and practicability (module C, KliMoPrax and UseUClim).
The MOSAIK consortium consists of partners from entire Germany that have joined their forces to create a UCM of unprecedented spatial resolution and computational performance and which shall allows simulations of large cities of size of up to 2.000 km² with grid-resolved buildings.
The central goal of MOSAIK is the development of a new, modern, user-friendly, highly-efficient, and high resolution urban climate model (UCM), which allows simulations of large cities. Besides large massively-parallel computers, the model shall also run on local PCs and workstations with limited resources. To achieve this goal, the new model will be based on the modern highly-parallelized large-eddy simulation (LES) code PALM, instead of using one of the existing UCMs that have been used for more than two decades, which are well-established but difficult to adapt to state-of-the-art parallel and future many-core computer architectures.
The new model will be able to perform runs for planning and climate scenarios for entire city environments at moderate resolution (about 100 m grid spacing) as well as short episodes such as daily cycles with building-resolving resolution (1-10 m) on large massively parallel computers.
The primary goal of work of the MOSAIK subproject at Freie Universität Berlin is to develop and evaluate online coupled chemistry modules with different complexity for both the LES and the RANS mode. Within the work package "Urban chemistry and air pollution" efforts are shared among Karlsruhe Insitute of Technology and Freie Universität Berlin (see graph below).
The inclusion of the chemistry module will allow air quality assessment and planning studies following TALuft and the determination of the impact of urban development (e.g. building structures, urban greening, emissions) on local air quality in detail. Pollutant concentrations (of e.g. PM, O3 or NO2) near sources in the urban canopy can be computed and analyzed on high horizontal and vertical resolution and pollutant exposures can be assessed.
For more information please visit the MOSAIK project website.
The working group Urban Climate and Urban Monitoring Network at the Institute of Meteorology is also part of the [UC]² consortium contributing to module B of the programme.