Lubbock researchers from The National Wind Institute braved the heart of Hurricane Harvey in order to gather information that will help them better understand the impacts of this storm.
Brian Hirth, Research Professor at the National Wind Institute, told us “We’ve had a preliminary look at the data, this was by far the strongest wind event of all the research done at Texas Tech with the StickNet platforms and they’ve been around for almost a decade. This was the strongest wind event that they’ve ever been deployed in.”
The research done by the National Wind Institute at Texas Tech is vital for providing information to the National Weather Service and other entities to help make post storm decisions as well as understand what occurred in various locations impacted by the storm.
Hirth said, “For Hurricane Harvey our primary objective was to take our measurement platforms, we call them StickNet platforms and these are mobile instrumented towers that we load up in a trailer, drive down to the coastal region during a land falling hurricane.”
Fourteen StickNets were deployed to measure wind speeds, temperature, relative humidity and barometric pressure.
Hirth explained, “There’s not very many measurements that are actually made during a land falling hurricane, a lot of the traditional measurement platforms fail. “
This makes these platforms vital in understanding the storm but it was no easy task.
Hirth elaborated, “Our last couple deployments were getting a little interesting, like I said the tropical storm force winds had moved on shore and we tried to hold a couple platforms to the very end so that we could fill them in right in the place we thought the strongest winds would be and so those last deployment were a little fun.”
