The new Extreme Wind Resilience Center (EWRC) has announced its inaugural lecture, which will take place on April 26, 2023, at 3:00 p.m. (CT). The virtual lecture, “Characterizing Extreme Near-Surface Winds in Tornadoes and Hurricanes,” will be delivered by Dr. Karen Kosiba.
Kosiba is the Managing Director of the Flexible Array of Radars and Mesonets (FARM) facility and an Adjunct Research Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Her research focuses on the kinematics and dynamics of severe convective storms, characterizing the low-level wind structure in tornadoes, and understanding boundary layer winds and small-scale structures in landfalling hurricanes. A key part of her research is executing field projects in order to collect data for improved analysis and prediction of these hazardous weather events.
Abstract: Near-surface winds in extreme wind events, such as tornadoes and hurricanes, impact and harm people and buildings, yet we still know relatively little about the nature of winds during these events. At the same time, tornadoes and hurricanes are very different meteorological phenomena, and they require different strategies to collect relevant wind data. For example, while there is a theoretical understanding of vortex structure in tornadoes, how this manifests in the atmosphere remains an active field of research, because the interpretation of radar measurements is complicated by the effects of debris centrifuging and the unknown dependency of wind speed on height given that most radar observations are above building height. Likewise, the nature and prevalence of small-scale coherent structures (such as boundary layer streaks/rolls, mesovortices, and tornado-scale vortices) in hurricanes are not well-documented and, consequently, are not yet well-understood. DOW mobile radars have been deployed to collect data on both tornadoes and hurricanes, and the data collected have implications for the interpretation of wind-damage relationships, for how radar observations are applied to tornado intensity rankings, and for predicting and understanding maximum wind damage potential at the surface observation level in hurricanes. Accordingly, this lecture will discuss two decades of DOW mobile radar observations in tornadoes and hurricanes, what we are learning about the nature of winds in these extreme events, various applications of this knowledge, and what future data collection and research foci will entail.
