Preface

摘要

Although wind itself may not be visible to the human eye, its effect on the built environment can be seen readily, and the hazards that it brings are of tremendous impact, both on life and critical infrastructure. Climate change has increased the risks of wind hazards among other natural hazards, and understanding the often-encountered hurricanes, tornadoes, and other types of nonsynoptic winds and large-scale wind storms became crucial for realistically predicting the wind impact on the built environment.Wind engineering is a multidisciplinary research area that lies at the intersection of different disciplines: fluid mechanics, structural dynamics, mathematics, atmospheric science, and computer science, among other technical areas. The physics involved in the processes of atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) and the interaction with the built environment are indispensable for the understanding of wind-induced loads and the response of the infrastructure. The tools employed in wind engineering include atmospheric modeling, boundary layer wind tunnels, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and full-scale data collection, among others.