  -02.jpg "Campus Plume")
  I had the opportunity last month to participate in the Computational Wind Engineering conference, hosted by Alan Huber at the University of North... Read More... President's Corner
While this year has already witnessed significant disasters, both natural and man-made, the "elephant in the room" as I write this, of course, is the drama that continues to unfold in the Gulf of Mexico and for which no resolution seems to be in sight. With the impending hurricane season, this uncontrolled discharge promises to create even more problems for the people (and other inhabitants) of the Gulf Coast region. This may be an environmental disaster of catastrophic proportions and there are many, many lessons to be learned from this event. Unfortunately, in many instances, it seems we either should have known, or did know, better. Perhaps mirroring the pattern that we have seen so often in our own field, while technical failures ultimately result in the direct negative impact, these failures occur in an "operational" environment that is influenced, and indeed in many cases trumped, by non-technical factors. To prevent such catastrophes, we need our current and future engineering leaders to ensure that they are part of not only the technical solution, but that they influence the context in which these solutions are deployed. This - without a doubt - applies to wind engineering as well. On a more positive note, we are very excited about the upcoming 2nd AAWE Workshop at Marco Island, Florida on August 18-20. We are most grateful to Kurt Gurley (and his team) from the University of Florida and Steve Camposano of High Velocity Inc for organizing this event, and we hope to see many of you there. Judging by the impact of the previous workshop in Vail, we a very optimistic that this too will be a huge success. The next major conference for us in wind engineering will be the international conference (ICWE), to be held next year in the Netherlands. And a little closer to home; I am very pleased to report that the next Americas' Conference on Wind Engineering (ACWE) will be hosted by a team led by Dorothy Reed from the University of Washington and Anurag Jain from Weidlinger Associates Inc in Los Angeles. I am particularly excited that this time the conference will be co-hosted by a team from academia and industry and am grateful to Dorothy and Anurag their leadership. Stay tuned for announcements and details! I hope you have a wonderful summer! Sincerely, Current
News
Register and book your room on Marco Island now! Houston event in late September 2010. A selection of PDf files are available at this NOAA site that describe the recent modifications to the venerable Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale. An NREL publication of the 2008 Workshop on wind-energy resorce and research needs will be of interest to many AAWE members. Click... |
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I had the opportunity last month to participate in the Computational Wind Engineering conference, hosted by Alan Huber at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Regrettably, I was only able to attend one day of the conference and I know that I missed an exciting program. My congratulations and thanks to Alan for planning and presiding over this successful event.