3D-modeling of the surface energy budget in an urban area

DART-EB : VALIDATION and FIRST RESULTS Context Urban areas have a significant impact on the energy and mass exchanges with the atmosphere. Their structure is characterized by important geometrical discontinuities, obstacles of large size, possible prevailing directions of streets, and by the presence of artificial materials displaying contrasted surface properties which combine to increase both turbulence and radiative processes inside and above the urban canopy. CAPITOUL (Masson et al., 2008) is an experiment devoted to the study of the urban boundary layer. It took place in Toulouse in 2004-2005 and involved a large instrumental set-up (meteorological and radiation measurements, flux stations, scintillometers, airborne measurements.