Low Altitude Wind Simulation over Mount Saint Helens Using NASA SRTM Digital Terrain Model

On February 11, 2000, the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) was launched into space as part of one of the pay load of the Shuttle Endeavor. Using a new radar sweeping technique most of the Earth´s surfaces was digitized in 3D in approximately 10 days. SRTM acquired enough data during its mission to obtain a near-global high-resolution database of the Earth´s topography. This paper describe how this revolutionary data set can be used to simulate anywhere around the Earth low altitude wind conditions for various atmospheric conditions. More specifically, we will describe the various processing steps necessary to convert this high-resolution terrain model provided by the SRTM database into a Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) volumetric mesh that is compatible with an open source CFD solver called OpenFOAM running in parallel on large West- Grid supercomputers. This work is the result of a new virtual wind-tunnel under development at the University of Alberta. In the paper, we present wind flow over the Mount- Saint Helens in the United States for a simple wind flow boundary condition.