A cooling tower scheme considering quantitative sensible and latent heat flux released from air condition was implemented in building energy model (BEM) and coupled to the regional model (WRF). A mechanical drag coefficient formulation was implemented into the WRF/BEM to improve the representation of the wind speed in complex urban environments. Two simulations used default WRF/BEP+BEM and improved WRF/BEM to estimate the improvement effects focusing on dry day and wet day for summer 2015, respectively. The cooling tower system in commercial area not only induces the significant increase of the anthropogenic heat partition by 90% of the total heat flux releasing as latent but also further changes the surface heat flux feature. When the cooling tower is introduced, averaged surface latent heat flux in urban area is increased to about 60 W·m−2 with the peak of 150 W·m−2 in dry day and 40 W·m−2 with the peak of 150 W·m−2 in wet day. Maximum and minimum temperature error improved by 2–3 degrees. In the vertical model, the performance of boundary layer structure in rural area is much better than in urban area. The average wind speed error improved by 2–3 m/s in urban area with new calculation scheme.
Part of the book: Understanding of Atmospheric Systems with Efficient Numerical Methods for Observation and Prediction