Professor receives award to study wind and hail storms

John Allen, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, received an award from the Disaster Resilience Program to fund his project, Quantifying the Risk and Impact of Wind and Hail Storms in a Warming Climate. The Disaster Resilience Program is a joint fund through the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the National Science Foundation.

According to Allen, agriculture and infrastructure are vulnerable during windstorms and hailstorms. The storms represent a hazard to electricity distribution and production networks, like wind turbines. This can lead to “localized cascading outages of water supply, automotive fuel, and heating/cooling systems.” Every year for the past decade has had at least 10 billion dollars of losses due to the storms.

Allen’s project will focus on determining the when and where of hail and wind extremes, as well as the long-term impacts of climate change on the storms.

The goal of his project is to develop improved building and infrastructure design practices, codes, and standards by combining his findings with climate change information.

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