Wind speed increases in pedestrian-level spaces around high-rise buildings tend to cause uncomfortable and even unsafe wind conditions for pedestrians. Especially, instantaneous strong winds can have a significant impact on the body sensation of pedestrians, and they are usually related to complex flow patterns around buildings. A detailed examination of flow patterns corresponding to instantaneous strong wind events around high-rise buildings is essential to understanding the physical mechanism of this phenomenon. To quantitatively evaluate the pedestrian-level wind environment around high-rise buildings, two important indices, speed-up ratio and speed-up area, have usually been introduced. In this study, a Large Eddy Simulation (LES) was conducted for square-section building models with different heights, represented by H (=100 m, 200 m, and 400 m in full-scale) or aspect ratios, represented by $H/B_0$ (=2, 4, and 8), where $B_0$ (=50 m in full-scale) represents the building width. Two instantaneous strong wind events providing a “maximum speed-up ratio” and a “maximum speed-up area” of pedestrian-level wind are investigated based on a conditional average method. The results indicate that these two instantaneous strong wind events usually do not occur simultaneously. Flow patterns around buildings for the two events are also different: the contribution of downwash tends to be larger for strong wind events providing “maximum speed-up area” showing more three-dimensional characteristics.

Wind speed increase in pedestrian-level spaces around high-rise buildings tends to cause uncomfortable and even unsafe wind conditions for pedestrians. Especially, instantaneous strong winds can have a significant impact on the body sensation of pedestrians, and they are usually related to complex flow patterns around buildings. A detailed examination of flow patterns corresponding to instantaneous strong wind events around high-rise buildings is essential to understand the physical mechanism of this phenomenon. To quantitatively evaluate the pedestrian-level wind environment around high-rise buildings, two important indices, speed-up ratio and speed-up area, have usually been introduced. In this study, Large Eddy Simulation (LES) was conducted for square-section building models with different heights H (=100m, 200m and 400m in full-scale) or aspect ratios H/B0 (=2, 4 and 8). Two instantaneous strong wind events providing “maximum speed-up ratio” and “maximum speed-up area” of pedestrian-level wind are investigated based on a conditional-average method. Results indicate that these two instantaneous strong wind events usually do not occur simultaneously. Flow patterns around buildings for the two events are also different: the contribution of downwash tends to be larger for strong wind events providing “maximum speed-up area” showing more three-dimensional characteristics.