User’s Guide for the Atmospheric Boundary Layer Environment – Lattice Boltzmann Model (ABLE-LBM) Web Application Version 1.0

Author(s):

Leelinda P. Dawson, Yansen Wang, and Jonathan W. Decker

Abstract:

The Atmospheric Boundary Layer Environment – Lattice Boltzmann Model (ABLE-LBM) is the next-generation microscale atmospheric model developed by ARL to simulate and predict the atmospheric boundary layer’s turbulent wind, temperature, moisture, and other scalar transports over complex terrain and urban areas. ABLE-LBM requires grid-rasterized terrain elevation, building, and vegetation data for the surface boundary information. This report serves as a user’s guide by defining the software installation requirements and key functionalities of the first version of a geographical information system (GIS)-based GUI web application for ABLE-LBM. The application not only handles the tasks of controlling data preprocessing, running the model, and data postprocessing of the model’s output to enable 2-D graphical visualization via Google Maps, but also creates building and vegetation data based on the images supplied by the GIS. The seamless integration of a GIS-based GUI with ABLE-LBM helps achieve the goal of simplicity and provides many enhanced functionalities for the application users.