Wall of Wind

At Florida International U, from Wired U

“On this model, up to 1,359 cumecs of air is driven from the fans through flow-management devices, including vertical spires and rows of "roughness": floor-level triangles that create turbulence.

This is how the team simulates what happens in the atmospheric boundary layer of a hurricane, where the winds meet obstructions. In a typical wind tunnel, says Liu-Marques, the blockage percentage is kept at around five to six per cent, but at WOW, this can be as much as 30 per cent without affecting the quality of the simulation. This means that scale models of entire towns could be put in front of the fans.”