WSN and Lidar Deployment during Hurricane Isaias, Satellite Beach, Melbourne, FL, Aug 2020

FIT WSNS (Florida Tech’s Wireless Sensor Network System) and FIT Lidar measured and recorded pressure, temperature and wind data during the passage of tropical storm Isaias on 2 August 2020. The FIT WSNS consists of pressure and temperature sensors, and R.M.Young anemometers; deployed on a residential house roof in Satellite Beach, Florida (GPS LOC: 28°10'33.5"N 80°35'41.8"W). Data from WSNS was collected from 2020/8/2 to 2020/8/4. FIT Lidar, a conically scanning ZephIR Z300 LIDAR had an open fetch with respect to the onshore flow (GPS LOC: 28.177°N, -80.590 °W) and 0.36km apart from WSNS deployment. Its wind data was sampled at 20-sec intervals at 10 vertical range gates (11m to 150m, above ground level). Data from Lidar was collected on 2020/8/2 for 11 hours. The different anemometry used in the WSNS and Lidar deployments during Isaias is useful to study wind changes as it moves inland to a residential area.

FIT WSNS deployment had 2 systems – old WSNS and new WSNS. The new system has an improved data collection software, compact aerodynamic casing and does not need routers, when compared to the old system. The new WSNS consisted of 2 pressure sensors with sampling rate(SR) = 10Hz, 1 reference pressure with SR = 10Hz and 1 anemometer with SR = 1Hz. The old WSNS consisted of 16 pressure sensors with sampling rate = 10Hz and 1 anemometer sampled at 6-sec intervals.

The goal of Isaias Deployment is to 1) Measure actual near-surface wind profiles for different wind speeds and directions; 2) Compare and validate the new WSNS against the old one; 3) Analyze wind pressures on the residential house roof and wind data from different anemometry, with Jupyter notebooks; 4) Use field data to validate and improve current wind loads recommendations and models for pressure distributions on building components, wind profiles and terrain roughness characterization.