Hurricane tower unveiled
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The newly completed portable weather tower was unveiled as an addition to hurricane research at LSU — and is expected to withstand hurricane-force winds while providing weather data from sites where hurricanes make landfall.
“One of the things we’re trying to do is accurately document hurricane intensity and wind field at landfall,” Rob Howard, adjunct assistant professor at the LSU Hurricane Center, told a group of about 20 meteorologists, students and other interested faculty.
Designed and constructed by mechanical engineering students, with significant help from the LSU Hurricane Center and the LSU Agricultural Center, the $35,000 tower was funded through a Louisiana Board of Regents Enhancement Grant, Howard said.
Before a forecasted storm makes landfall, Howard and a deployment team take the tower to where they think landfall will occur.
During transport on a modified trailer, the tower folds into a compact package. At the site, it takes four people about an hour to set up the equipment and secure the tower to the ground.
Equipment on the tower should be able to continue to take measurements up to 200 mile per hour winds, Howard said.
The entire deployment, though, takes much more time — from three to five days, he said.
The logistics are complex: finding a good site for the tower, obtaining permission from the landowner, setting up the tower, then getting out of harm’s way, Howard said.
Information gathered by the tower can be used in emergency management planning and disaster response, Howard said. In addition, the data can be used in hurricane research and computer modeling.
The tower still needs some fine-tuning, but could be deployed if a storm forms in the next two weeks, although the real-time data wouldn’t be ready by then, he said. Eventually, real-time data, or information that is fed as it occurs to a computer back at LSU, will be available, Howard said.
He said the plan is to have a second tower built in the next year to be ready for the 2009 hurricane season.
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It's very interesting how the group of 7 mechanical engineering students that spent an entire school year devoted to this project only gets mentioned in one sentence of this whole article. Our team consisted of Timothy Borne, Garrett McCrory, Travis Rushing, Robert Stromer, Matt Taghehchian, Anna Wojctanowicz, and myself. We spent the entire fall semester of this past school year designing the tower. The following semester, was devoted to constructing and testing the tower so it could be ready to present for our Senior Design project. Our group won the Ben Burns Award, for top Senior Design project, which the article also fails to mention. Countless hours every week, even spring vacation, was spent cutting, welding, and grinding metal in order to make this tower look and perform extremely well. It would have been nice to have the article at least pay some respect to those individuals that made this project what it is today.
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