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Wall of Wind Engineering Research Draws Wide Interest Among Researchers, the General Public

Widely read Florida International University research paper tackles localized wind loads on tall building façades

Published on May 21, 2025

An illustration of how the winds of a downburst fan out in open space. In a city with tall buildings, the wind can deflect off buildings, causing damage in unexpected ways. NASA/Wikimedia Commons

A paper authored by researchers at the Florida International University Wall of Wind experimental facility is drawing significant attention among researchers and the general public. The paper is entitled “Wind load impact on tall building facades: damage observations during severe wind events and wind tunnel testing.” Published in February 2025, the paper is part of a Frontiers in Built Environment special collection focused on the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure, NHERI, a network supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

The work highlights the May to July 2024 back-to-back extreme wind events that affected the U.S. Gulf Coast, specifically Houston, including a powerful derecho and Hurricane Beryl. Downburst winds caused shocking damage to the city’s skyscrapers, including extensive glass breakage and façade failures. The FIU testing campaign, described in the paper, seeks to reassess wind effects on tall buildings to better understand the complexities of wind forces in urban environments.

Read the original paper
Wind load impact on tall building facades: damage observations during severe wind events and wind tunnel testing

Check out papers the NHERI Frontiers Special Collection, currently in progress
Frontiers in Built Environment Special Collection, NHERI 2015-2025: A Decade of Discovery in Natural Hazards Engineering

Read the FIU companion article in The Conversation
What is a downburst? These winds can be as destructive as tornadoes − we recreate them to test building designs

View the paper’s engagement measurement on the Frontiers site and on the Altmetric site.

To date, the article has been viewed nearly 4,000 times on the Frontiers in Built Environment website, more than 69% of all Frontiers articles. It has been downloaded 679 times. Additionally, the paper has earned an extraordinary score of 302 on the Altmetric scale, a well-regarded measure of online engagement – the number of times a paper has been shared, mentioned, reviewed, and read online. Specifically, since February 2025, the FIU paper has been mentioned by 36 news outlets, 3 blog outlets and multiple social media channels. In fact, this NHERI at FIU paper is among the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric.

To better disseminate their research findings to the public, the FIU team authored a companion article for the magazine The Conversation, entitled “What is a downburst? These winds can be as destructive as tornadoes − we recreate them to test building designs.” This piece explains damaging wind phenomena like downbursts in plain language, enabling non-experts to understand the importance of NSF-funded engineering research underway at the Wall of Wind facility.

The popularity of the Frontiers paper demonstrates keen interest in wind engineering among a broad audience — and how NSF-supported engineering research benefits our nation as a whole. NSF CMMI Award #2146277. CAREER: Bridging the Global Gap on Understanding Downburst Impacts on Buildings: Field Data-Modeling Research and Education for More Resilient Communities.

Kudos, and thanks, to paper authors Omar Metwally, Haitham A. Ibrahim, Amal Elawady, Ioannis Zisis, and Arindam Gan Chowdhury.