Effective roughness and displacement height over forested areas, via reduced-dimension CFD

While extensive field campaigns as well as modern remote sensing methods based on airborne laser scans allow obtaining of detailed information about forest canopy structure, there is still a great need for simple and consistent description of vegetation roughness, as its parametrization differs significantly from one flow model to the other (e.g. CFD, mesoscale and linearized models). Here, we present a method to facilitate use of forest data, having an arbitrary level of detail, in flow models employing different types or levels of canopy drag-force prescription.