Tornado behavior inferred from forest damage The newest project in the lab is a collaboration with three colleagues: Ricky Wood is a structural engineer and aerial imagery expert at University of Nebraska Lincoln; Frank Lombardo is a civil engineer at University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne; and Chris Godfrey is a meteorologist at University of North Carolina Asheville. We are collaborating to understand how tornadoes interact with topography. This project is focused on an area along the Kentucky-Tennessee border, called Land Between the Lakes, which is densely forested and was struck by two tornadoes on 10 December, 2021. The project is funded by a new 2022 RAPID grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation. This work will rely heavily on drone imagery for the two entire tornado damage tracks through LBL; the drone imagery was obtained in March 2022, thus prior to tree leaf-out. Ricky is converting the imagery to very impressive 3-D point clouds via a technology called structure-from-motion. This offers amazing potential because in the output, every point has x, y, and z coordinates, so we can actually measure tree sizes within the point cloud. The project has just gotten started, but as an example of structure from motion point clouds, the graphic below is actually a point cloud of forest damage -- i.e. it is not a photograph itself, but is made up of millions of points, each with a color and with x, y, and z coordinates. So the graphic could be rotated to view from different angles.
