Hurricane Chasers Contribute to Understanding of Wind Behavior
     The team of hurricane-chasing researchers who made history last year by capturing an up-close, real-time view of land-falling Hurricane Isabel has now tracked enough subsequent storms to begin providing findings that may reduce the devastating effects of hurricanes on coastal homes and buildings.

     And the team is still at it. (Track real-time wind speed transmission data from Hurricane Ivan as it approaches the U.S. Gulf Coast.)

     Florida Sea Grant helps support the Florida Coastal Monitoring Program (FCMP), a coordinated research effort sponsored by the state's Department of Community Affairs and consisting of researchers from the University of Florida, Florida International University, the Florida Institute of Technology, and Clemson University.

     The overall goal of the FCMP is to reduce damage to coastal structures by providing clues about ground-level hurricane wind behavior that can be used to make buildings more wind resistant. Since the partnership was formed in 1998, the team's highly successful work has been giving weather forecasters and engineering researchers an unprecedented view of a hurricane's critical landfall period and the resultant load on homes. The FCMP database of 11 storms is now large enough to begin producing some statistically significant findings.
     Catastrophic loss due to hurricanes is the largest and most pervasive risk faced by Florida. Insured losses from Hurricane Andrew in 1992 were placed at $15.5 billion, the highest ever for a natural disaster; early damage estimates for Hurricane Charley range from $5 billion to $14 billion, the second costliest event in history.
 
     Data is collected in two ways: from lived-in residences retrofitted with wind sensors, and from mobile wind towers placed in front of the hurricane's landfall.
 
     Florida Sea Grant has funded two pilot projects in the effort (Kurt Gurley, UF, 1999; Jean-Paul Pinelli and Chelakara Subramanian, FIT, 2000) to measure wind data for three hurricanes (Dennis, Floyd, Irene) and to upgrade house-based sensors and software to analyze the data collected by the sensors. Two two-year projects followed.

    The three investigators then partnered on a 2002-04 project to develop new instrumentation to measure and characterize ground-level hurricane wind fields, to quantify and model the resultant wind force interaction with man-made coastal structures, and to test remote tower transmission of real-time data.
 
     A new project that began in early 2004 is designed to use the data from the first project to evaluate the vulnerability of man-made coastal structures to hurricane wind damage, quantify reductions in risk through the use of retrofits and new construction methods, and conduct a cost-benefit analysis of these mitigation measures.
 
         During Hurricane Isabel in North Carolina in September, 2003, the mobile wind towers worked flawlessly, and transmitted for the first time in history real-time wind velocity data of a landfalling hurricane. Researchers and forecasters, notably at the NOAA Hurricane Center (NHC) in Miami, received via a wireless Internet connection, real-time reports of ground-level coastal wind speed (at 17 and 34 feet off the ground), wind direction and barometric pressure. NOAA’s experimental H* Wind analysis model relied almost exclusively on this source of field information for much of Isabel, as the permanent weather stations experienced massive failure. FEMA also accessed the real-time data to calibrate their wind field model, which was used by HAZUS software to protect structural damage.

     According to Peter Black at the NOAA Hurricane Center, “I was able to relay the reports to NHC forecasters, giving them a sense of how quickly conditions on the coast were deteriorating as Isabel approached land."

      Florida Sea Grant support has been a significant resource for the deployment of the portable towers and real-time wind velocity measurement systems, which also worked flawlessly during Hurricane Charley and Hurricane Frances in 2004.
 
      The FCMP has also placed pressure reading instruments on lived-in residential structures along Florida’s coast. Now on 32 homes, the system is activated and the wind pressure on the roof of the homes is collected during a land-falling hurricane. FSG researchers at FIT have developed a second generation version of the system, using wireless technology, reducing costs and allowing more sensors per house. The system was successfully tested during Hurricane Charley.