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Tanya Brown

Wind Science and Engineering

I picked weather, or depending on how you view it, perhaps weather picked me. As a young child growing up in Southern Kansas, I had seen my fair share of severe weather and tornadoes, and the damage they can do. Being the stepdaughter of an Army officer, I lived in a lot of different places, including Hawaii during Hurricane Iniki, and North Carolina during both Hurricanes Fran and Floyd. My biological father's home was destroyed by a tornado in Oklahoma when I was in grade school. With this kind of past, I knew Atmospheric Science was the perfect choice for a major for me, and I pursued a bachelor's degree at the University of Kansas, which I completed in 2004. I continued my education at KU, pursing a master's degree in Water Resources Science in 2006, where I studied the relationship between radar-estimated precipitation and precipitation collected by rain gages in flashflood-prone areas of the Kansas City metro. The next step was the Wind Science and Engineering doctoral program at Texas Tech University, which provided me the opportunity to further my interest by focusing on the structural damage caused by severe weather, and I was appointed as a NSF IGERT fellow in 2006.

Since arriving at Texas Tech, I have spent each spring participating in Project MOBILE in 2007 and 2008, in which a 12-person team strives to collect high-resolution meteorological data by deploying weather instruments in the path of supercell thunderstorms in the Great Plains. This year our team participated in the NSF-funded VORTEX 2 project, along with numerous other organizations, with the hopes of collecting the most complete tornado dataset in history. I am also a member of the 4-person TTU Hurricane Research Team, which deploys the same weather instruments in land-falling hurricanes.
Photo courtesy of Mike Texter

During the 2008 season, our team deployed for Hurricanes Dolly, Gustav, and Ike, collecting some of the only continuous data records for these storms. Results and findings from this year's hurricane data were presented at the 11th Americas Conference on Wind Engineering, in June in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

In addition to storm research, I have also completed several damage documentations following natural disasters. From October 2007-July 2008, I served as the lead researcher for the Institute for Business and Home Safety (IBHS) team investigating the Witch Creek Wildfire in San Diego County in California. In this project, I documented the characteristics and damage states for more than 2,000 homes, from aerial photographs, a low-flying helicopter survey, and ground surveys, to determine what factors caused a home to be spared, damaged, or destroyed by this wind-driven wildfire. The project identified ways to make existing properties safer from wildfires. The results were released in July 2008 at two press conferences in Sacramento and San Diego, CA, and published in a report available from IBHS. This research was also presented at the 33rd Annual Hazards Workshop in Broomfield, CO in July 2008. In addition, I was part of a 3-person team which documented the damage caused by the "Super Tuesday" tornado outbreak in Tennessee in February 2008. We collected high-resolution ground based imagery to assess the damage and assign EF-scale ratings to the structures impacted. We have also obtained satellite imagery for a portion of the affected area. Under the leadership of Dr. Daan Liang, my dissertation research focuses on determining a relationship between ground-based damage and remotely-sensed damage in windstorms, and will utilize the datasets collected from this storm, as well as others. Results from the ground-based survey were presented at the 33rd Annual Hazards Workshop in Broomfield, CO in July 2008, the 1st American Association for Wind Engineering Workshop in Vail, CO in August 2008, and the 6th International Workshop on Remote Sensing for Disaster Response in Pavia, Italy in September 2008. The next stages of the project involving the remotely-sensed data were presented at the 11th Americas Conference on Wind Engineering in June in San Juan.