ORIGINAL ARTICLE Application of CFD modelling to air quality in Kuwait City Meruyert Zhunussova 1 • Martin Jaeger 2 • Desmond Adair 3 Received: 1 June 2016 / Accepted: 21 November 2016 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016 Abstract High-resolution computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations have been performed to assess the dispersion of air pollutants (CO 2 ) emanating from traffic in a busy street and in the vicinity of a complex configuration of buildings located in Salmiya, Kuwait City. New buildings are planned for this area, and the work here includes pre- dictions for the dispersion of pollutants after the buildings’ completion. The CFD simu- lations are based on calculated CO 2 concentration levels for traffic counts taken on location in Salmiya with the existing configuration of buildings. As the computer code used in this work has been evaluated previously, it will be applied here to predict with confidence any potential air pollution problem areas on the addition of the new buildings. It was found for very light wind, that the proposed new buildings help reduce pollution in the vicinity of residential buildings within the configuration of buildings, but as the wind becomes moderate to strong, there was a tendency for the pollutant to get trapped in the residential area. Results are given for both exceptionally high ambient temperatures and very light wind, which are not often reported in studies found in the literature. Keywords Computational fluid dynamics (CFD)  Built environment  Street canyon  Air quality  Light wind 1 Introduction Within the last years, micro-scale computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models have become an efficient and common simulation tool for assessment and prediction of air quality in urban areas. The urban environment, from the point of view of air pollution, is & Martin Jaeger M.Jaeger@ack.edu.kw 1 Department of Civil Engineering, Nazarbayev University, Astana 010000, Republic of Kazakhstan 2 Department of Civil Engineering, Australian College of Kuwait, Mishref, Kuwait 3 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Nazarbayev University, Astana 010000, Republic of Kazakhstan 123 Environ Fluid Mech DOI 10.1007/s10652-016-9497-5