Daniel Wright, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, is adding his expertise in extreme storm prediction research to the new Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Convective Storms (CIRCS).
Wright is the University of Wisconsin-Madison site director for CIRCS, which will be located at Northern Illinois University.
CIRCS will conduct research that aims to make society more resilient and better able to withstand the impacts of “convective” storms—like tornadoes, hail and extreme rainfall. The collaborative center includes nearly two dozen scientists from the fields of atmospheric science, engineering, geography, physics, computer science, actuarial science, and risk and insurance.
“We’re mainly going to focus on things like hail and wind damage, but also more upstream questions about seasonal prediction,” Wright says. “For example, that’s trying to see if next summer is going to be at, below or above average in terms of the number of storms we’re seeing and their severity, and whether these patterns are shifting over time.”
The National Science Foundation is providing $1.5 million in funds over five years to establish the center, which will be further supported by about a dozen private companies, with each paying an annual membership fee and in return helping to direct the focus of CIRCS research.
“It’s kind of like Shark Tank,” says Center Director and NIU Professor of Atmospheric Science Victor Gensini. “Researchers will pitch projects, and industry members will vote on projects for the fiscal year.”
Damage from severe convective storms has been on the rise in recent decades, driven by changing weather patterns and shifting geographical populations.
According to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Information, the United States was buffeted by 190 separate billion-dollar weather and climate disasters from 2015 to 2024. These events, which are often driven by convective storms, killed more than 6,300 people in total and caused roughly $1.4 trillion in damage. CIRCS research thrusts will focus on convective storm risk, prediction, societal impacts, changing weather patterns and data science modeling.
Wright developed the StormLab software, which uses a method called stochastic storm transposition to calculate rainfall impacts on different areas. StormLab can create millions of hypothetical, realistic storm scenarios that can be used for a wide range of applications including flood risk calculations. He’s recently been working on a project, with support from American Family Insurance, to translate that work to hypothetical hailstorms. It’s an example of the type of work that could scale up through CIRCS.
“There are synergies with people in atmospheric sciences who do field observations or use satellites for observations, while we create models,” Wright says. “The idea with this center is that it will bring all of these people together with expertise from across different disciplines to make the research bigger than it would otherwise be.”
Along with Wright, UW-Madison principal investigators at CIRCS are Andrea Lopez Lang, an associate professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, and Kyle Cranmer, a professor of physics and director of the Data Science Institute. Additional investigators include Daniel Bauer, Peng Shi and Justin Sydnor, professors of risk and insurance; Philip Mulder, an assistant professor of risk and insurance; Paul Block, a professor of civil and environmental engineering; Tristan L’Ecuyer and Jonathan Martin, professors of atmospheric and oceanic sciences; and Angela Rowe, an assistant professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences.
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