Giometto and his colleagues performed a series of detailed simulations of the wind flow over and within a neighborhood of the city of Basel and compared results against wind tower measurements collected within the same area. By accounting for the spatial variability of streets and buildings in the same Basel neighborhood they were able to show that, for certain parameters that play a role in the local weather and the dispersal of smoke, smog, or other pollutants, approximating the city as an uniform patch of land can lead to errors up 200 percent.