PICS Colloquium: Mean flow and turbulence in unsteady urban canopy flows with Marco Giometto

Speaker: Dr. Giometto is an Assistant Professor in the Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics department at Columbia University and an Amazon Visiting Academic. He studies both fundamental and applied problems related to fluid dynamics and turbulence, with an emphasis on atmospheric boundary layer processes. He received his Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Braunschweig TU University and the University of Florence in 2014, and in 2016 he earned a second Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Before joining Columbia University in 2018, he held postdoctoral positions at the University of British Columbia and at the Center for Turbulence Research at Stanford University.

Abstract: Advancing the current understanding and capability to predict atmospheric flow and related transport in urban areas is critical for many applications, including air quality modeling, urban climate, pedestrian comfort and structural resilience. Turbulence in these environments is rarely in equilibrium with the underlying surface and is typically characterized by strong departures from statistical stationarity. For example, the atmospheric boundary is often driven by a range of (sub)meso forcings that can evolve over sufficiently short time scales and result in unsteady flow conditions in cities. Yet, current theories describing mass, energy, and momentum transport in urban areas are largely established for equilibrium and statistically stationary flow. This presentation will provide an overview on the effects of a particular class of flow unsteadiness (flow pulsation) on the structure of mean flow and turbulence in urban areas. The discussion will focus on the impact of flow unsteadiness on flow statistics and on the geometry of coherent structures responsible for momentum and kinetic energy transport.

Here is a Zoom link for those who cannot join in person!