CAREER: Remote Sensing for Enhanced Understanding of Tornado Actions and Broadened STEM Education in Rural West Texas

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The goal of this Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award is to advance understanding of the impacts of tornadoes on structures through the use of remote sensing technologies at both small and large scales. Although tornadoes are known to produce some of the strongest winds on earth, sufficient understanding of the magnitude, frequency, and structure of these violent winds remains elusive. To effectively design structures that provide protection for life and property against tornadoes, it is necessary to better understand the wind speeds in tornadoes, the interaction of tornado winds with structures, and the likelihood of tornado occurrences. At the small scale, this research will employ cutting-edge technologies, such as laser scanning and digital imaging, to create highly detailed, 3D digital models of tornado-damaged structures. The research will also examine large-scale tornado phenomena by using earth-observing satellite images to help detect "missing" (unobserved) tornadoes. Improved characterization of regional tornado climates, wind structures, and wind speeds will improve tornado forecast models and risk-based design methodologies. Heightened understanding of tornado hazard will advance society's ability to plan for, and rapidly respond and recover from, disasters, thus promoting national welfare and prosperity. This project also will provide a platform to enhance STEM education in a large rural portion of West Texas by encouraging the pursuit of graduate education through engaging undergraduate students in research collaborations with U.S. and international research institutions and an expansive Natural Hazards Workshop/Symposium series that will bring researchers from academia, government, and industry to campus to inspire students to pursue research and innovation for challenging natural hazard mitigation problems. Data from this project will be archived and shared in the NSF-supported Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) DesignSafe Data Depot (https://www.DesignSafe-ci.org). The objectives of this CAREER award are the achievement of rapid and comprehensive multi-scale wind damage assessments through remote sensing, advancement of understanding of tornado-structure interaction, and inspiration and training of students for vital roles in securing national welfare and prosperity through minimizing life and property losses from wind hazards. Through strategic research collaborations, the Principal Investigator and undergraduate student researchers will explore tornado actions via remote sensing technologies at multiple scales. At small scales, reality-capture-enhanced modeling of tornado-induced failures of engineered steel structures will utilize 3D reality-capture platforms (photogrammetry and lidar) and optimization of these platforms to balance the breadth and depth of detailed forensic analyses of damaged structures (in collaboration with the Texas Tech University National Wind Institute). This modeling will then be used to investigate tornado impacts on structures through the measurement of deflections and study of failure patterns. At the large scale, the project will investigate a methodology to detect "missing" tornadoes via multi-spectral image analysis to enhance tornado climatology in sparsely populated and forested areas (in collaboration with Western University in Canada). The research will advance the knowledge of complex tornado-structure interactions, estimation of tornado intensity, and detection of tornado occurrences via safe, reliable, efficient, and cutting-edge remote sensing technologies at spatial scales ranging from minute structural deformations to the overall tornado-path level. The research will provide validation methods for physical and numerical tornado load simulations, facilitate necessary adjustments to wind speed estimates in the Enhanced Fujita Scale, and explore optimization of high-resolution imaging platforms to most effectively advance the understanding of tornado effects on the built environment. Detection of "missing" tornadoes will enhance climatology studies, providing a basis to improve forecasts, warnings, and risk models.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.