THUNDERSTORM DOWNBURSTS: MONITORING, MODELLING, SIMULATION AND LOADING OF STRUCTURES

Thunderstorms are frequent phenomena that cause wind speeds and wind-induced damage often greater than those due to extra-tropical cyclones. This new paradigm of wind engineering gave rise to a recent burst of research despite which there is not yet a model of thunderstorm outflows and their loading of structures like that developed for cyclones in the early 1960s and still in use in the engineering practice. In a planetary phase of climatic evolutions, this shortcoming is exalting the excessive safety and cost of high-rise buildings with respect to the apparent unsafety of low- and medium-rise structures in thunderstorm days. This paper describes the research carried out at the University of Genova on this problem, the results it is producing and their perspectives