The 2004 hurricane season resulted in insured losses in excess of $20 billion. The 2005 hurricane season was even more catastrophic with Katrina identified as one of the costliest and most fatal natural disasters ever suffered by the U.S. Surveys of the structural damages caused by these hurricanes exposed the inadequacies in the existing building codes and practices. The existing codes (e.g. ASCE 7-05) are developed based on wind tunnel testing of model scale structures in open exposure, including some correction factors for full-scale effects. However, more accurate statistical models that would include the effects of varying exposure require extensive and reliable measurement of wind fields and pressures on different full-scale buildings. The current field measurement technologies for hurricane environments are subject to data loss and reliability issues, rapid deployment problems, and lack the means for "real-time" rectification of any system breakdowns during data collection. This proposal is to design and build a network of wireless sensor systems to reliably measure the hurricane wind loads on residential structures. An extensive test bed (structures ready to receive the instrumentation) already exists, providing the PIs access to over 30 structures along the Florida coast on which to employ the sensor network. The resulting full-scale datasets will be used to establish relationships between actual full-scale loads and the wind tunnel datasets used to create load provisions. One of the innovative parts of the proposal is to create an integrated reliable system for multi-point sensing in harsh environment by combining cutting edge local and global wireless networking and modern low power electromechanical sensors technologies. The system will comprise a cluster of mobile nodes (sensors) distributed over the roof top and walls of a residential or commercial building, or essential infrastructure, and a centrally located, environmentally protected master node (base unit) to monitor the operation of the mobile nodes and act as a data repository. The master node will communicate in real time with a central command located away from the landfall area, for remote management, monitoring, and data transmission. The second innovative part of the proposal is to create an object oriented and adaptive data acquisition algorithm. Finally, availability of the high quality measurements from the wireless sensor networks will provide the PIs with means of evaluating existing wind structure interaction models and wind tunnel studies and to create models that are more sophisticated and more accurate than the ones that exist today in the building code.
