26th Conference on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology

Thursday, 6 May 2004: 5:00 PM
Equivalent 10-meter wind speeds in Hurricane Fabian
Napoleon III Room (Deauville Beach Resort)
Kyle Beatty, Risk Management Solutions, Inc., Newark, CA; and C. Miller and A. Boissonnade
Poster PDF (87.2 kB)
Hurricane Fabian impacted the Bermuda archipelago on 5 September 2003. Fabian’s center of circulation passed 15 miles to the west of the islands, placing the most intense portion of the hurricane eye wall directly over the main island of Bermuda. Two instrumented towers located on the south coast and central portion of the main island collected detailed wind data during Fabian’s landfall. The catastrophe modeling technologies developed by Risk Management Solutions, Inc. are used to estimate the effect of upwind terrain on wind speed at instrument height for various wind directions. The wind measurements at these two sites are adjusted to derive the equivalent wind speed at the same height above a flat, level surface. A simple vertical wind profile model is used to estimate the open terrain wind speeds at 10 meters above sea level. The results of this analysis allow estimation the wind-speed based Saffir-Simpson category of Fabian as it passed over the islands.

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