Thanks for your comments the information about the Florida Coastal Monitoring Project. While I’m sure that it provides useful data regarding gross wind velocities, I was thinking of something larger and planned from a scientific/engineering perpective. My point of reference on this issue is the large effort that has taken place in the earthquake community to measure strong ground motions close to the fault during an earthquake. To be sure, there would be a need for careful design and planning for deployments so they don’t blow down. There is also a need to carefully document the site conditions (presence of buildings, vegetation, topography, distance from shore etc.), because these will influence the local wind fields. If such data were collected over many hurricanes, my sense is that we would learn a lot about how the hurricane wind fields are modified close to the ground as the cyclone move across land. The fact is that the boundary layer wind velocities are extremely complex, yet we have very little data on how the wind fields evolve with time/space in this region. With this sort of information, we could learn a lot about the ideal siting of builings to minimize the threat from hurricane winds. In my view, this is an important research goal, but we are still a long ways off on this issue.

Not to mention conducting research and development of systems to reduce the strength of hurricanes in general. Such research and development would serve not only New Orleans, but the entire southern and eastern coast of the United States, from Brownsville, TX to Boston, MA.

You talk of the wealth of data collected during the Hurricane’s travel over water, but the relative lack of wind data collected in communities.

The Florida Coastal Monitoring Project (http://users.ce.ufl.edu/~fcmp/) erects wind monitoring towers and outfits homes with monitoring equipment, and they do this just before the hurricane makes landfall to get the highest possible wind speeds.

This work is sponsored by the State of Florida, Clemson, and the Univ. of Florida This group does work outside of Florida as well (MS, LA, TX most recently).

This is not on the level of a large, national program and I agree there are issues concerning the relative imbalance of storm observations before landfall and observations of structural performance during landfall.

Two quick questions:
(1) If reinforced concrete structures do not survive a hurricane, how do we design instrumnets to withstand the hurricane and the debris in the air and in the storm surge?

(2) How much more information do we need to suggest reliable building codes to withstand different categories of storms? More data is a plus, but since uncertainties will always exist, do we need more data or just more action and more (economic) incentives for action?