Starting with the description of meteorological variables in forest canopies and its parameter variations, a numerical three-dimentional model is developed. Its applicability is demonstrated, first, by wind sheltering effects of hedges and, second, by the effects of deforestation on local climate in complex terrain. Scientists in ecology, agricultural botany and meteorology, but also urban and regional lanners will profit from this study finding the most effective solution for their specific problems.

Forest canopies cover about 30% of the land surfaces some of which are hilly or mountainous. Both complex terrain and forest canopies influence mean flow and turbulence, playing a critical role in affecting momentum and scalar transfer. Although recent advances have been made in numerical simulations of canopy flows, few have been conducted over steep slope terrain and considered full sets of physical and physiological processes in sub-canopy layers, which greatly limits our understanding of canopy flows and scalar transfer. To address this limitation, we upgrade the Weather Research and Forecasting model with the large-eddy simulations module (WRF-LES) by incorporating the immersed-boundary method (IBM) to improve the simulations over steep slope terrain. In addition, an advanced multiple layer canopy module (MCANOPY) is developed based largely on the Community Land Model version 4.5 and coupled with WRF-LES to simulate sources and/or sinks of momentum, heat, water vapor, and CO2 across multiple canopy layers. Both IBM and MCANOPY are evaluated against field measurements, demonstrating good performances compared with observations. The updated modeling system (i.e., WRF-LES-IBM-MCANOPY) is then applied over a forest edge to investigate the effects of foliage distributions and scalar distributions on canopy flows and scalar transfer. The results show that foliage distributions have a significant impact on the flow dynamics and scalar transfer, mainly due to the sub-canopy jet. The scalar distributions affect the scalar field with the ground source being the most important. The modeling system also simulates flows over forested hills. Flow dynamics over a three-dimensional hill show a different feature to those over a two-dimensional hill, where much large turbulence structures are simulated in the lee of a three-dimensional hill. Simulations over different slope hills demonstrate significant impacts of slopes. The lee side turbulence is enhanced as the hill slope increases. A new flow feature is the nearly unvarying flow field within the canopy in the lee of a steep slope hill, subjected to the influence of foliage distributions. Our upgraded WRF-LES-IBM-MCANOPY system has demonstrated promising capacities in many applications such as wind-turbine siting, wildfire propagation prediction, and interpretation of eddy covariance data over complex landscapes.

The work is dedicated to the investigation of the interaction between an Atmospheric Boundary Layer and a canopy (representing a forest cover). We have focused our attention to the complex problem of the generation and transformation of turbulent vortices over homogeneous, heterogeneous and sparse canopy. This problem has been studied using Large Eddy Simulation (LES) approach and High Performance Computing (HPC) technique.The numerical results reproduced correctly all the main characteristics of this flow, as reported in the literature: the formation of a first generation of coherent structures aligned transversally with the wind flow direction, the reorganization and the deformation of these vortex tubes into horse-shoe structures. The results obtained with the introduction of a discontinuity in the canopy (reproducing a clearing or a fuel break in a forest) are compared with the experimental data collected in a wind tunnel. In this case, the results confirmed the existence of a strong turbulence activity inside the canopy at a distance equal to 8 times the height of the canopy, referenced in the literature as the Enhance Gust Zone (EGZ) characterized by a local peak of the skewness factor. Then, the process of passive scalar transport from a forest canopy into a clear atmosphere is studied for two cases, i.e., when the concentration held by the forest canopy is either constant or variable. While this difference has little influence on the concentration patterns, results show that it has an important influence on the concentration magnitude as well as on the dynamics of the total concentration in the atmosphere.

The 'classical' turbulence approach to the flow of air in a vegetative canopy is reviewed. Three separate 'classical' theories are described. A comparison is made between experimentally measured canopy flows and a velocity function derived from the theory of structured continua. The agreement between theory and observations is good, but not unexpected, due to seven degrees of freedom in the fitted velocity profile. Proposals for future study for a more rigorous test of the theory are discussed.