Research

How extreme winds interact with the built environment…

This page will be continuously sculpted as I learn more and my sail explores new horizons…

I use experimental simulations of non-stationary winds to refine our understanding of how they affect the built environment—drawing on all the publicly available databases, because there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. The aim is to close the lingering gaps with more practical approaches, advance ASCE 7, and carry this effort into risk and resilience work…

From the field to the lab to practice: how my work links full-scale measurements, experiments, structural response, and design guidance.

Research Overview

Communities in the U.S. and worldwide are increasingly exposed to climate extremes that reach the built environment through wind. Short-lived, non-stationary winds, such as thunderstorm downbursts, derechos, and tornadoes, affect buildings and infrastructure in ways current design practice does not yet fully capture.

My research asks how these winds interact with structures and infrastructure systems, and how to turn that understanding into design standards and risk tools that help communities adapt. I build a chain that runs from full-scale field measurements, through large-scale experiments and fluid–structure interaction analysis, to codes, standards, and risk models. It is organized around four questions:

How do structures behave under full-scale extreme wind events?
How can these events be scaled into wind tunnels and numerical models?
Which flow parameters must be reproduced, and which can be relaxed?
How can these insights be built into ASCE 49 and ASCE 7, and into risk models that distinguish hurricanes from thunderstorms?

The work is far from complete—it keeps evolving…

That chain has taken me from the Wall of Wind, to the University of Genoa’s full-scale thunderstorm records, to IBHS, and now to CPP, where I apply wind tunnel testing in practice, so I work on both sides of the translation every day. Looking ahead, I see three thrusts:

The physics and loading of non-stationary extreme winds.
A proper place for tornadoes and downbursts in the standards. ASCE 49 states that “simulation of tornadoes, downbursts, and other non-synoptic winds is in its infancy relative to the simulation of synoptic, or boundary-layer, flows.” My work is one brick toward revising that statement and toward a proper representation of tornadoes and downbursts in ASCE 7.
Hazard-distinct, climate-informed risk models that separate hurricane and thunderstorm contributions and account for back-to-back events.

Most of my publications close with pressing questions that still linger in the wind engineering community—hopefully I will get to address them, or they will inspire someone else to pursue them…

Research Areas

A downburst-like wall jet spreading over the ground, with the nose-shaped vertical profile that sets it apart from boundary-layer winds.

Simulating Downbursts: Flow Characterization and Time–Frequency Scaling

Thunderstorm downbursts are short-lived and transient, so no wind tunnel or numerical model reproduces them perfectly. I characterized the downburst-like outflow at the Wall of Wind using 3D Particle Image Velocimetry, covering the nose-shaped profile, vertical wind component, flow angles, static pressure, and turbulence spectra, and reframed the question from “how perfectly is the flow simulated?” to “which flow parameters critically influence wind loading, and is their simulated range adequate?” Building on this, I developed a time–frequency scaling framework that enforces similarity in both the time and frequency domains. Built on a library of more than 500 velocity time histories and validated against full-scale events recorded with the University of Genoa, it gives researchers and practitioners a consistent way to reproduce field events across facilities and simulation techniques.

A lattice transmission tower with a missing member, vibrating under a downburst-like outflow.

Aeroelastic Response of Damaged and Aging Power Infrastructure

Power infrastructure often faces the next storm before damage from the last one is repaired. Using 1:50 aeroelastic models at the Wall of Wind, I tested undamaged and partially damaged transmission towers under downburst-like outflows, with member removal representing aging and successive extreme events. Damage raised RMS acceleration responses by 86% along-wind and 74% across-wind, and both towers showed non-quasi-static behavior, meaning equivalent static approaches can misjudge their demand. Related work extends this to transmission line systems under non-uniform downburst loading.

A monopole mounted on the roof of a high-rise building, swaying with the building beneath it.

Coupled Vibrations of Rooftop Structures on Tall Buildings

Rooftop telecommunication monopoles are usually designed as if they stand on rigid ground. Through aeroelastic wind tunnel tests under atmospheric boundary layer wind, I showed that coupling with the across-wind vibration of a 166-m high-rise building can magnify the RMS across-wind forces at the monopole tip by up to 8.83 times, an interaction current standards overlook.

Related work: Aeroelastic testing of monopole mounted on a high-rise building (JWEIA 2025); Wind-induced dynamic response of roof-mounted monopoles (American Conference on Wind Engineering 2025)

A high-rise façade grid under wind loads.

Building Envelopes under Wind and Wind-Driven Rain

Much of the damage, and much of the cost, of extreme winds lands on the building envelope. My state-of-the-art review of high-rise façades under wind loading brings together how façade systems perform and fail, and my Wind-Driven Rain Fellowship at IBHS showed me how this research becomes mitigation practice. Earlier work on extreme value estimation of wind pressure coefficients on low-rise buildings feeds the same goal: design pressures that reflect how envelopes are actually loaded.

A tornado vortex approaching a low-rise building and a solar panel.

Tornado-Induced Loads on Buildings and Solar Infrastructure ongoing

Tornado provisions in ASCE 7 are still young, and the loads tornadoes impose on low-rise buildings and on solar energy infrastructure, critical to the clean-energy transition, are far from settled. I am building a research line that uses experimental simulation of non-stationary winds to estimate peak aerodynamic pressures under tornado-like flows and to compare them with those under straight-line, atmospheric boundary layer winds.

Related work: Manuscripts in preparation (see the open questions)

A 50-m lattice telecommunication tower with a full-scale monitoring system (anemometer, accelerometers, strain gauges, and cameras), whose response was investigated under full-scale ABL and downburst events.

Full-Scale Response of Lattice Towers under ABL and Downburst Winds under internal review

Wind tunnels tell only part of the story, so I also follow towers in the field. Using a high-resolution monitoring system on a 50-m lattice telecommunication tower in Sannicolau Mare, Romania, I examined the tower’s response to one atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) event and two downbursts of broadly similar intensity, including a multi-downdraft downburst not previously examined in the literature. Its signature is an extended peak zone generated by multiple ring vortices, secondary ramp-up and ramp-down phases, and several peaks of comparable magnitude. Tracking aerodynamic damping over 1-min intervals revealed a vortex-shedding mechanism behind excessive across-wind vibrations under both ABL and downburst winds. Continuous wavelet transforms then isolated the vortex-induced vibration component, whose intensity during downbursts is strongly tied to the magnitude and sign of the flow acceleration.

Related work: Full-scale wind-induced response of a telecommunication tower subjected to ABL and downburst winds through field measurements (manuscript); Structural response of telecommunication lattice tower under synoptic winds (American Conference on Wind Engineering 2025)