Abstract
Wind disasters are responsible for significant physical destruction, injury, loss of life, and economic damage. This study examined the extreme wind triggering mechanism over a typical mountain area with complex terrain, i.e., Dali city in Yunnan Province on the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau in China. Using the observation data, we first optimized the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model configuration and parametrization schemes for better simulating the wind in this area using a 1-month simulation. Then, the triggering mechanism of extreme wind was investigated by performing a series of sensitive experiments based on a typical extreme wind case. The results indicate that terrain uplift is critical for triggering the local 8–9-scale (the wind velocity between 17.2 and 24.4 m/s) extreme winds over high topography regions. When a large-scale atmospheric circulation is passing, accompanied with regional terrain lifting, the instantaneous wind velocity can reach 9- to 10-scale (the mean wind velocity between 20.8 and 28.4 m/s), causing broken power lines. These results suggest that it is essential to avoid sites where these factors can affect the operation of power transmission lines, or to establish warning systems in the existing systems.
Highlights
Extreme wind events pose significant threats to human safety and the integrity of infrastructure
The estimated average annual loss caused by wind disasters exceeds 6 billion US Dollar (USD), constituting more than 50% of the total weather-related damages and more than 40% of total natural disaster-related injuries globally [4,5]
The land-use types/vegetation types are from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) classifications improved by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program (IGBP)
Summary
Extreme wind events pose significant threats to human safety and the integrity of infrastructure. The effects of extreme wind may not be limited to wind damage, because concurrent heavy rains and flooding often wreak additional havoc [1,2]. Defined a mixed wind climate and formulated a ground-breaking method to determine the extreme wind velocity distribution in such a mixed condition [3]. The prediction of wind is one of the most debated and controversial topics in weather and climate prediction [2,6]. Local extreme winds are associated with specific geographic locations and reflect micro-climate and topographic features [7]. Mountains are prone to localized extreme winds [8]. In China, 70% of the country’s territory is in mountainous areas, which account for more than 45% of the total population [9]
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