Scientists at Texas Tech University have been working toward the goal of better understanding the effects of damaging wind events since 1970 when a devastating F5 tornado struck near the University and destroyed much of downtown Lubbock. In spite of the large societal impact of such wind events, surprisingly many crucial questions about wind and its effects are left unanswered. Behavior of the wind within the surface boundary layer of severe storms, sources of momentum related to these events, and the influence of the boundary layer wind on buildings and other structures are poorly understood. Additionally, wind is responsible for soil erosion and blowing dust, which is especially a problem in West Texas and other areas of the Midwest Research into these complex problems is interdisciplinary in nature, requiring a team with comprehensive expertise in the fields of atmospheric science, civil engineering, and mathematics. Texas Tech researchers have embraced this philosophy and have become national leaders in wind related research.
Texas Tech offers a unique environment for this research, fostering a well-developed multidisciplinary program in Wind Science and Engineering (WISE) research with active participation by faculty in Civil Engineering, Atmospheric Sciences, Mathematics, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Economics. West Texas weather provides ample opportunity to directly measure the boundary layer wind profiles of severe thunderstorm events and to study problems related to soil erosion. In addition, Texas Tech researchers have demonstrated the ability to travel to coastal areas and successfully deploy instrumentation in the eyes of land-falling hurricanes. An important aspect of the WISE program is the recruiting of a diverse student population and the training of both graduate and undergraduate students in the use and application of the wide variety of available instrumentation.
Current existing facilities include the Wind Engineering Research Field Laboratory (WERFL) that is designed to measure the vertical wind structure at a field site location using an instrumented tower and to measure the resulting pressure loads from the wind on a full-scale test. Funding has also been obtained to install a local network of meteorological instrumentation (a mesonet) capable of measuring mesoscale atmospheric conditions, including the capability of measuring some boundary layer wind profiles. This represents a vast improvement in the amount of regional meteorological information that will be available for research activity. In addition, a rugged mobile-instrumented tower has been developed for field research activity.
These research facilities produce the foundation for WISE research activities. Unfortunately, many of these facilities have evolved over time from a non-interdisciplinary perspective; the wind engineering research was interested in wind effects at a given site, while the atmospheric research focused on scales larger than the boundary layer. As a result, the current interdisciplinary research is limited by the inability to take measurements of wind events on the intermediate scale between these focuses. On this scale atmospheric boundary layer phenomenon hinder the ability to correlate the observable meteorological phenomenon with tie effects of the wind on structures.
This major research instrumentation effort (MRI) is designed to provide an integrated system for measuring atmospheric processes in the surface boundary layer and the effects of those processes on built structures. The MRI equipment includes instrumentation to:
measure standard surface meteorological parameters. equip an array of fixed meteorological towers to take very detailed measurements of winds in the vicinity of the full-scale test building. measure the amount of suspended dust in the air to measure the effects of local soil erosion and to develop studies into air quality base on regional scale wind information. measure the effects of wind pressure on the corners of buildings. develop a computer system required to integrate these data with existing data sets and to archive the resulting data set.
