Trees as Sensors, Distribution of Wind Intensity During Hurricane Maria

The 2017 Hurricane Maria transpired into the most devastating tropical cyclone in Puerto Rico. Consequently, Maria’s strong wind destroyed nearly all weather stations thus voiding ground wind speed information as the storm passed through the island. The notion of this study is to further use the broken trees on the island as sensors to estimate the wind speed of Hurricane Maria and its distribution through wind-tree breakage mechanics calculation. Island-wide pre and post LiDAR point clouds were processed into canopy height models for individual tree segmentation. More than 150 million trees were delineated with each stem diameter at breast height (DBH) modeled from canopy height and crown size. The difference in canopy height shows the eastern part of the island having a greater percentage of broken trees with areas toward the landfall in the southeast experiencing the largest portion of breakages up to 60% broken trees. The resulting wind speed at 10 m above surface derived from critical wind speeds of individual trees are then aggregated by a 115 km
²
range in a gradient from 100 km/h on the southwestern coast to nearly 260 km/h on the southeastern coast at the landfall.