Scientists zoom in on fine-scale movements of damaging gusts
Nov 21, 2024 - by David Hosansky
When Hurricane Milton roared onshore in Florida last month, its powerful winds shredded the roof of Tropicana Field in Tampa, which had originally been planned as a staging area for emergency responders. Other parts of the city, however, suffered much milder wind damage.
Such complex variation in powerful winds is a hallmark of landfalling cyclones. Although Milton had sustained winds of 120 miles per hour over the open waters of the Gulf, its wind patterns fractured over land when the storm ran into buildings, trees, and other features of the land surface. This kind of turbulence means that certain locations in a city may take the brunt of a hurricane's destructive blasts.
For meteorologists, the chaotic winds raise a critical question: Is it possible to predict the strength and location of gusts and eddies to help coastal communities better prepare for their widely varying impacts?
"We've become a lot better at predicting tropical cyclones in terms of their track and intensity and their wind fields over the open ocean," said Christopher Rozoff, a scientist with the U.S. National Science Foundation National Center for Atmospheric Research (NSF NCAR). "But an area we struggle with is the wind field over land. This is an emerging area of research, and right now there's a huge push in the research community to simulate these winds and advance our understanding of how they behave."
Rozoff and his colleagues have been using very high-resolution computer modeling for several years to simulate hurricane winds over an idealized urban environment.
In a paper last year in the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, Rozoff and co-authors from NSF NCAR and the University of Miami in Florida showed how structures generate distinct and intricate wind patterns, tunneling and amplifying winds in urban canyons between buildings while contributing to weaker winds downstream. The research was funded by NSF and the U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command.
As such simulations become more realistic, they can help utility crews and other emergency responders anticipate where a landfalling hurricane will cause the greatest damage. The simulations can also help urban planners design more resilient communities.
Full article and visualizations available at https://news.ucar.edu/132998/capturing-turbulence-landfalling-hurricane-winds
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Rachel Dammann
UCAR, UCP and NSF NCAR
Boulder CO
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