Near-ground hazards associated with downburst-producing thunderstorms

Leigh G. Orf, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Usage Details

High impact winds, such as those formed within thunderstorms that produce downbursts and tornadoes, are responsible for a significant amount of damage to the built environment. In order to better understand the wind load caused by downbursts, wind engineering models have been developed to simulate downbursts; however these models lack important physics, typically forcing downbursts with a barotropic impinging jet model. Utilizing a cloud model that has demonstrated the ability to simulate tornado-producing thunderstorms at unprecedented resolution on Blue Waters, downburst-producing thunderstorm simulations will be conducted at extremely high resolution. These simulations will improve our understanding of the internal workings of downburst-producing thunderstorms in several different environments, while also providing data that can be used to improve simpler wind engineering models of downbursts that are used to evaluate the load these downbursts present to structures such as power transmission lines.