Tornado community-level spatial damage prediction including pressure deficit modeling

Abstract Based on the observation of damage from past tornadoes, tornado intensity is frequently the highest at the center and gradually decreases outward, which is consistent with a Rankine vortex model. In this study, the Rankine vortex model was applied to model the pressure deficit resulting from a tornado, and then combined with pressures resulting from wind velocity to develop fragility surfaces for buildings representative of the typical residential building stock in a community. In the absence of data, an additional coefficient is used herein to consider different amount of pressure deficit participating in wind loads on buildings to enable community resilience studies. However, it is duly noted that at the individual building level the internal pressure coefficient used in ASCE-7 should be adjusted based on data to be consistent with current wind engineering methods in the United States. Moreover, a scenario tornado path was modeled based on historical statistics of U.S. tornadoes over almost four decades using mean values, and spatial damage to a cluster of wood-frame buildings representative of a residential subdivision of a community was investigated. The methodology presented herein can provide damage information spatially over a community which is a key to studying resilience at the community-level.

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