Urban land use land cover (LULC) change raises ambient temperature and modifies atmospheric moisture, which increases heat-related health risks in cities. Greenspace and bluespace commonly coexist in urban landscapes and are nature-based heat mitigation strategies. Yet, their interactive effects on urban thermal environments are rarely assessed and it remains unclear how extreme heat events (EHEs) affect their ability to regulate human thermal comfort. Using multi-year observations from a dense urban observational network in Madison, WI, we found that green and blue spaces jointly modify the intraurban spatiotemporal variability of temperature and humidity, and the resultant effects on thermal comfort show diurnal and seasonal asymmetry. Greenspace is more effective at cooling throughout the year, particularly at night. Accelerated cooling efficiency is found in areas with dominant greenspace coverage and little co-influence from bluespace. The thermal comfort benefit due to greenspaces can be offset by bluespaces because of intensified nighttime warming and humidifying effects during the warm months, although a weak daytime cooling of bluespace is observed. EHEs enhance bluespace cooling, but the overall joint thermal regulation remains the same due to the enhanced moisture effect. Our findings suggest that diverse outcomes of green and blue spaces cross multiple temporal scales should be holistically assessed in urban planning. The analysis framework based on generalized additive models is robust and transferable to other cities and applications to disentangle the nonlinear co-influences of different drivers of urban environmental phenomena.

Large-eddy simulations are conducted to contrast momentum and passive scalar transport over large, three-dimensional roughness elements in a turbulent channel flow. Special attention is given to the dispersive fluxes, which are shown to be a significant fraction of the total flux within the roughness sublayer. Based on pointwise quadrant analysis, the turbulent components of the transport of momentum and scalars are found to be similar in general, albeit with increasing dissimilarity for roughnesses with low frontal blockage. However, strong dissimilarity is noted between the dispersive momentum and scalar fluxes, especially below the top of the roughness elements. In general, turbulence is found to transport momentum more efficiently than scalars, while the reverse applies to the dispersive contributions. The effects of varying surface geometries, measured by the frontal density, are pronounced on turbulent fluxes and even more so on dispersive fluxes. Increasing frontal density induces a general transition in the flow from a wall bounded type to a mixing layer type. This transition results in an increase in the efficiency of turbulent momentum transport, but the reverse occurs for scalars due to reduced contributions from large-scale motions in the roughness sublayer. This study highlights the need for distinct parameterizations of the turbulent and dispersive fluxes, as well as the importance of considering the contrasts between momentum and scalar transport for flows over very rough surfaces.

According to Townsend’s hypothesis, so-called wall-attached eddies are the main contributors to turbulent transport in the atmospheric surface layer (ASL). This is also one of the main assumptions of Monin–Obukhov similarity theory (MOST). However, previous evidence seems to indicate that outer-scale eddies can impact the ASL, resulting in deviations from the classic MOST scaling. We conduct large-eddy simulations and direct numerical simulations of a dry convective boundary layer to investigate the impact of coherent structures on the ASL. A height-dependent passive tracer enables coherent structure detection and conditional analysis based on updrafts and subsidence. The MOST similarity functions computed from the simulation results indicate a larger deviation of the momentum similarity function ϕ _m from classical scaling relationships compared to the temperature similarity function ϕ _h. The conditional-averaged ϕ _m for updrafts and subsidence are similar, indicating strong interactions between the inner and outer layers. However, ϕ _h conditioned on subsidence follows the mixed-layer scaling, while its updraft counterpart is well predicted by MOST. Updrafts are the dominant contributors to the transport of momentum and temperature. Subsidence, which comprises eddies that originate from the outer layer, contributes increasingly to the transport of temperature with increasing instability. However, u′ of different signs are distributed symmetrically in subsidence unlike the predominantly negative θ′ as instability increases. Thus, the spatial patterns of u′ w′ differ compared to θ′ w′ in regions of subsidence. These results depict the mechanisms for departure from the MOST scaling, which is related to the stronger role of subsidence.

Large‐Eddy Simulations (LESs) of neutral flow over regular arrays of cuboids are conducted to explore connections between momentum (z_0m) and scalar (z_0s) roughness lengths in urban environments, and how they are influenced by surface geometry. As LES resolves the obstacles but not the micro‐scale boundary layers attached to them, the aforementioned roughness lengths are analyzed at two distinct spatial scales. At the micro‐scale (roughness of individual facets, e.g., roofs), it is assumed that both momentum and scalar transfer are governed by accepted arguments for smooth walls that form the basis for the LES wall‐model. At the macro‐scale, the roughness lengths are representative of the aggregate effects of momentum and scalar transfer over the resolved roughness elements of the whole surface, and hence they are directly computed from the LES. The results indicate that morphologically based parametrizations for macro‐scale z_0m are adequate overall. The relation between the momentum and scalar macro‐roughness values, as conventionally represented by and assumed to scale with (where Re_∗ is a roughness Reynolds number), is then interpreted using surface renewal theory (SRT). SRT predicts n = 1/4 when only Kolmogorov‐scale eddies dominate the scalar exchange, whereas n = 1/2 is predicted when large eddies limit the renewal dynamics. The latter is found to better capture the LES results. However, both scaling relations indicate that z_0s decreases when z_0m increases for typical urban geometries and scales. This is opposite to how their relation is usually modelled for urban canopies (i.e., z_0s/z_0m is a fixed value smaller than unity).

Large-scale circulations around a city are co-modulated by the urban heat island and by regional wind patterns. Depending on these variables, the circulations fall into different regimes ranging from advection-dominated (plume regime) to convection-driven (bubble regime). Using dimensional analysis and large-eddy simulations, this study investigates how these different circulations scale with urban and rural heat fluxes, as well as upstream wind speed. Two dimensionless parameters are shown to control the dynamics of the flow: (1) the ratio of rural to urban thermal convective velocities that contrasts their respective buoyancy fluxes and (2) the ratio of bulk inflow velocity to the convection velocity in the rural area. Finally, the vertical flow velocities transecting the rural to urban transitions are used to develop a criterion for categorizing different large-scale circulations into plume, bubble or transitional regimes. The findings have implications for city ventilation since bubble regimes are expected to trap pollutants, as well as for scaling analysis in canonical mixed-convection flows.