New Research Units To Track Hurricane Winds

A catastrophe modeling firm said they are funding a university research program that involves deploying mobile towers to capture hurricane wind speed data.

AIR Worldwide Corp. in Boston announced that the company will sponsor the research efforts by Texas Tech University to further scientific understanding of the detailed structure of hurricane winds over land.

The university's research team has an impressive track record for the collection of land-based wind speed data. For example, they obtained the only complete wind speed record from the eastern eye wall of Hurricane Katrina, “which has proven invaluable to the many meteorologists and wind engineers who continue to analyze the storm and its impact on structures,” according to Jayanta Guin, vice president for research and modeling at AIR

Texas Tech's researchers have designed and built a fleet of mobile observation towers that can be quickly deployed in the path of an approaching hurricane, and AIR said its funding will enable Texas Tech to increase the number of platforms it can put into action.

“Our ability to understand the variability of wind speeds over land has been hampered by the limited number of reliable observations,” noted John Schroeder, assistant professor at Texas Tech University's Wind Science and Engineering Research Center at Lubbock, Texas.

Mr. Schroeder explained that in the past they could manage only limited observations because they were using a few pieces of very bulky equipment that sometimes could not be maneuvered into a site.

The new units are six feet tall but telescoped up to eight feet in height. Beneath the anemometer tripod is a data acquisition box and a battery box reinforced to withstand a 150 mile-per-hour wind. They can be pulled off their 16-foot trailer and put in place in three minutes, noted Mr. Schroeder.

He said the university has built seven of the units and plans to build five more by the end of August. Each one costs about $8,000, and AIR is providing almost $40,000 towards their construction.

Mr. Schroeder said that in previous years the university has not had enough “spatial coverage to document the hurricane wind field as it crosses the coastline, which is important for projecting the impact of an approaching storm on on-shore structures.”

Historically, only a handful of reliable wind speed measurements have been collected for any individual landfalling hurricane, and most anemometers and recording systems fail at even slightly elevated wind speeds, while being rendered useless when power fails, AIR noted.

Each mobile platform is capable of recording a complete, high resolution, wind speed time history. Coupled with data on the characteristics of the surrounding terrain, the platforms will provide a more accurate picture of the structure of hurricane wind fields, AIR said

“The scientific, engineering and risk modeling communities will all benefit from the research being undertaken by Texas Tech,” said. Mr. Guin