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
![supercell](/files/2817/environmental-wind-research-supercell.jpg)
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
- developing a national convective wind storm climatology using a coupled observation-simulation approach to extreme value analysis and event based stochastic modelling,
- estimating the expected change in convective wind hazard to Australia under projected climate change scenarios,
- 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.