- Assistant Professor Pedro Fernandez-Caban leads a team of researchers into landfalling hurricanes to study the storm's windfield.
- The research aims to improve our knowledge on how hurricanes damage property, and create better building codes and preventive measures that help protect property from future storms.
- Watch the video to see how the research is conducted, its mission, and how toold like artificial intelligence play a role.
BROADCAST TRANSCRIPT:
I’m Meteorologist Riley Winch. And as another hurricane season is now underway, I made my way to the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering to discover ways scientists right here in the Big Bend have used the threat of approaching hurricanes to help protect us from storms in the future.
The past few years have brought a multitude of hurricanes to the state of Florida, and much of the Gulf coast.
And the damage they’ve brought has been extensive.
That’s why Assistant Professor Pedro Fernandez-Caban of the FAMU-FSU college of engineering is leading a team to study the science behind it.
“We go out and deploy instrumentation during landfalling hurricanes and we’re trying to capture the most extreme winds.”
And the goal?
“We’re trying to relate how these extreme winds affect civil infrastructure”
And the opportunity to conduct research in every hurricane that makes landfall makes their research even better. Since every storm is different, the project focuses on “trying to compare the wind fields between different storms. Try to see and find some commonalities depending on where the measurements were taken.”
Local terrain and geography can have an impact on the severity of wind damage on different structures. While urban areas are able to record a fair amount of wind data during a storm, there are lots of gaps in data collection in areas like Taylor county, where there is not as much infrastructure to measure hurricane impacts. This is where artificial intelligence can play a crucial role.
“We’re trying to implement some machine learning and AI tools to help us predict what the wind field would be at a location where we don’t have any data”
Professor Fernandez-Caban hopes the team can “transfer this knowledge into building codes and design provisions so that we can sort of enhance the design of buildings and civil infrastructure.”
There may be more opportunity for this research to collect more data with a coming storm. If a storm does make an unfortunate impact, there will still be good work done by scientists that will help better protect your neighborhood from the next one. Live in the studio, I’m Meteorologist Riley Winch, ABC 27.
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