Interactive Low-Cost Wind Simulation For Cities

Abstract

Wind is an ubiquitous phenomenon on earth, and its behavior is well studied in many fields. However, its study inside a urban landscape remains an elusive target for large areas given the high complexity of the interactions between wind and buildings. In this paper we propose a lightweight 2D wind simulation in cities that is efficient enough to run at interactive frame-rates, but also accurate enough to provide some prediction capabilities. The proposed algorithm is based on the Lattice-Boltzmann Method (LBM), which consists of a regular lattice that represents the fluid in discrete locations, and a set of equations to simulate its flow. We perform all the computations of the LBM in CUDA on graphics processors for accelerating the calculations.