Why not put sensors on houses?

[Hannah.Taylor]

A picture from a recent article about the tornadoes that hit Oklahoma this weekend piqued my curiosity.

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I noticed the house on the corner is completely destroyed while the one to the right of it took a glancing blow, then the one to the right of it took substantial damage and the one to the right of it looks fairly intact with the middle top portion of the roof impacted the most.

Referring to that row of four houses at the bottom of the pic.


My thought process here is why not mass produce censors for large neighborhoods in tornadic prones areas to better understand the wind profiles inside the tornado to better explain why one house on a street receives catastrophic damage and another only receives a glancing blow.

 

[JamesCaruso]

Interesting idea, but it would be enormously expensive relative to the potential benefit. The probability that a tornado is going to hit a given neighborhood / subdivision is tiny. The sensors would have to be in place for a very long time and would need maintenance, upgrade or replacement too.

My comment assumes this idea is for data collection / research, not something that would directly enhance the safety of the occupants). The

 

[Hannah.Taylor]

Interesting idea, but it would be enormously expensive relative to the potential benefit. The probability that a tornado is going to hit a given neighborhood / subdivision is tiny. The sensors would have to be in place for a very long time and would need maintenance, upgrade or replacement too.

My comment assumes this idea is for data collection / research, not something that would directly enhance the safety of the occupants). The

I would think you could input all known tornado activity into a computer and have it pinpoint the most likely areas to be hit in the future to minimize the initial cost. Computers can pick out those highly prone areas better than we can.

The data collection/research would definitely lead to increased safety in houses and in building materials for homes if we knew how those winds impact a home, a street, an entire neighborhood.

 

[Warren Faidley]

I believe a lot of this data can be generated by modeling now days. In addition, multi-vortex tornadoes have somewhat chaotic wind fields, rapidly accelerating and changing direction which I would assume accounts for hit and miss damage. The cost of modifying homes to withstand such winds would likely be cost prohibitive, especially in low-income areas. For my money, community shelters would be a better idea.

 

[Hannah.Taylor]

I believe a lot of this data can be generated by modeling now days. In addition, multi-vortex tornadoes have somewhat chaotic wind fields, rapidly accelerating and changing direction which I would assume accounts for hit and miss damage. The cost of modifying homes to withstand such winds would likely be cost prohibitive, especially in low-income areas. For my money, community shelters would be a better idea.

I don't think you could implement it by modifying homes, but with new home builds for sure.

 

[Brian R.]

In theory, that would be an awesome idea, and could lead to better constructed homes and businesses in areas where tornados are a very frequent threat but who would be responsible for the purchase, installation, maintenance and ultimate upgrade/replacement of the sensors and associated hardware for them? Unfortunately if left up to the current government administration in Washington DC, and since the NWS is a federal agency the last I checked I do not see this happening, let alone be maintained and updated properly, let alone have coordination to monitor and analysis of the data. If the homeowner, business owner or management companies are ultimately responsible to purchase, install, maintain and update the units, I do not see many whom would be willing to absorb the cost of it, not to mention who would be willing to let anyone from the current federal administration to enter their property to actually do the installation of the sensors and the routine maintenance and upgrades they would need?

 

[Jeff Duda]

Jim pretty much hit the nail on the head in every way with his response. It is true that any given location, even in the most tornado-prone areas of the world, will go 1000 years or more without seeing a direct tornado strike. You'd have to put anemometers on millions of houses to get even 1 direct strike per year. No homeowner is going to pay for research grade anemometers, which easily tally upwards of $1000 each (not including data logger).

Warren is correct that computer modeling is capable of handling these situations, and there is probably some published research laying around. I also know that Iowa State University had a scale model of a tornado that they used for observing this exact behavior. They went as far as designing scaled down houses and trees and performing stereo-photogrammetry to calculate wind vectors in debris-loaded tornadoes.

Finally, we generally already know why there are such spatially inhomogeneous damages in densely structured areas. We know most tornadoes contain multiple suction vortices that enhance ground-relative wind speed in one are while negating some of it on the other side. And those suction vorticies move around within the tornado as the tornado itself translates. Finally, we know that air flows break down to molecular turbulence at the smallest scales. It's probably just not worth studying the airflows at the sub-meter scale, as winds on larger scales are enough to significantly damage most structures.