School of Civil Engineering

Wind engineering research

Wind Research Laboratory (WiRL) is comprised of atmospheric scientists and engineers that conduct specialised, interdisciplinary research in the following areas:

  • Catastrophe loss modelling
  • Post-storm damage assessments
  • Severe convective thunderstorms (e.g. downbursts and tornadoes)
  • Tropical cyclones
  • Wind engineering
  • Wind tunnel research
  • Bluff body (building) aerodynamics

Current projects

  1. Characterising the hazard, structure, and impacts of severe convective wind storms
  2. Storm Reports
  3. Using realistic disaster scenario analysis to understand natural hazard impacts and emergency management requirements
  1. Numerical simulation of the progressive collapse of transmission line systems
  2. Tropical Cyclone Wind Field Characterisation
  3. Unsteady bluff body aerodynamics

1. Characterising the hazard, structure, and impacts of severe convective wind storms

supercell
A supercell thunderstorm.

This project aims to quantify the risk convective wind storms pose to Australia in a manner that ensures engineers and disaster managers can meaningfully mitigate the impact of future events. Specifically, this project is

  1. developing a national convective wind storm climatology using a coupled observation-simulation approach to extreme value analysis and event based stochastic modelling,
  2. estimating the expected change in convective wind hazard to Australia under projected climate change scenarios,
  3. utilising the growing body of three-dimensional wind field data – radar and anemometry based – to develop novel spatio-temporal wind field models for convective wind storms

This project is funded through a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award from the Australian Research Council.