This thesis presents two distinct bodies of work concerning quadrotor flight in urban wind fields. The first attempts to characterize a quadrotor's ability to exploit urban wind fields for improved flight performance. A computational fluid dynamics model is used to obtain a wind field estimate given a 3D model of the environment and a prevailing wind estimate. Minimum-energy trajectories are th...

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Extratropical transition brings about a number of environmentally induced structural changes within a transitioning tropical cyclone. Of particular interest among these changes is the acceleration of the wind field away from the cyclone’s center of circulation along with the outward movement of the radial wind maximum, together termed wind field expansion. Previous informal hypotheses aimed at ...

Multiple disasters such as strong wind and torrential rain pose great threats to civil infrastructures. However, most existing studies ignored the dependence structure between them, well effect of direction. From dimension engineering sector, this paper introduces vine copula model joint probability distribution (JPD) speed, direction intensity based on field data in Yangjiang, China during 197...

This paper describes a method for estimating wind field (wind velocity, rate of change of wind velocity and wind gradient) for small and mini unmanned aerial vehicles. The approach utilizes sensors which are already part of a standard autopilot sensor suite (GPS, inertial measurement unit, airspeed, magnetometer). The primary motivation is enabling energy harvesting; a secondary motivation is d...

Wind affects adversely the cooling tower thermal performance. A field investigation was carried out to study the thermal performance of Heller cooling towers under wind conditions, involving measurement of wind velocity and its direction around the cooling tower, and obtaining water flow rates and temperatures at the cooling tower inlet and outlet. Results show that air suction at the tower top...

[1] The Wang–Sheeley–Arge solar wind model makes use of coupled potential field source surface (PFSS) and Schatten Current Sheet (SCS) models to reconstruct the coronal magnetic field on the basis of the observed line-of-sight photospheric magnetic field and a 1D kinematic code to propagate the solar wind to 1 AU. The source surface serves as the outer boundary of the PFSS model and the inner b...

Spaceborne scatterometers are the only proven method for global all-weather measurement of vector winds at the ocean’s surface. Such measurements are critical inputs in studies of oceanic circulation and air/seainteraction where the time variability of the surface wind field and the wind stress curl drive the ocean; hence, our interest in the spectrum of the surface wind field. In this paper we...

Wind-blown sand is a typical example of twophase particle-laden flows. Owing to lack of simultaneous measured data of the wind and wind-blown sand, interactions between them have not yet been fully understood. In this study, natural sand of 100–125 lm taken from Taklimakan Desert was tested at the freestream wind speed of 8.3 m/s in an atmospheric boundary layer wind tunnel. The captured flow i...