Measurement & Characterization of Hurricane Wind Loads on Structures Using a Wireless Sensing Networking System

The researchers from Florida Institute of Technology deployed their wireless sensor network (WSN) system on the rooftop of a house near Satellite Beach, Melbourne, Florida (longitude and latitude: 28.175944, -80.592710) during the recent hurricanes Matthew and Irma passage to collect real-time data. The WSN is an autonomous full-scale hurricane data measurement system with 30 pressure and temperature sensors, and an anemometer to measure pressure, temperature, wind speed and wind direction. All sensors are connected wirelessly through 3 routers to a base modem, which is connected to the laptop for collecting the data. The data from the laptop was uploaded through a cellular network at five-minute intervals to a Box account, which provides cloud storage and file sharing collaboration. The entire wireless sensor network system was monitored using Team Viewer remote desktop application. All the data collected in the Box was then uploaded to the DesignSafe.ci data depot. For post-processing and analysis of the uploaded data, a unique graphical user interface (GUI) application was created using MATLAB, which is capable of analyzing the complete data set on a single run. The authors can run the GUI code instantly on the cloud and provide plots of the physical data using the virtual desktop connection to the DesignSafe workspace.