Progress of the ASCE Wind Speed Estimation Standards Committee

The importance of understanding the risk of damage to our infrastructure from tornadoes and other severe wind storms leads the meteorological, engineering and forest science communities to a goal of creating a better climatology of these events.  This interest has led to several strategies to accomplish this goal.  These included the formation of an ASCE standards committee to improve wind speed estimation, development of a high-resolution GIS-based storm data archive, and an improvement in techniques to understand the risk using present climatology of tornadoes.  The ASCE wind speed estimation standards committee is currently drafting a standard with the first version ready to be available some time in late 2017 or early 2018.  The contents of this standard, created by a broad cross-section of stakeholders, will include improvements to the EF Scale, and a description of other methods to estimate wind speed ranging from the remote and in-situ sensing of the events and their aftermath to forensics of structural and vegetative damage.   This presentation will be about providing a look into the future on how the information in this standard will influence the NWS Storm Data product and its eventual impact the future climatology of tornadoes and severe wind storms.  In addition, we will discuss the implications of having this standard co-branded between the ASCE and the AMS.