The impact of heat and inflow wind variations on vertical transport around a supertall building – The One Vanderbilt field experiment

The impact skyscrapers have on wind flow remains poorly characterized, thus affecting atmospheric dispersion predictions in dense urban centers. A new mobile observatory equipped with remote sensors controlled by a smart sampling protocol was developed to collect high-resolution (18 m, 15 s) observations throughout the atmospheric layer below 1.5 km. A series of four deployments was performed around the One Vanderbilt skyscraper (H1 = 427 m) located in Manhattan, NY to document wind flow and temperature in canyons with relatively high width-to-depth ratios (H2/W ~ 1.2–7.5; H2 being the height of the adjacent building) and steepness (H1/H2= 2.1–11.2) and that under a range of inflow wind and solar heating conditions.