Monica Arul helps launch statewide tornado and straight-line wind summit

Dr. Monica Arul talks about the story behind the summit at Virginia's first statewide Tornado & Straight-line wind summit in Smithfield Center, VA on October 15, 2025

When civil and environmental engineering assistant professor Monica Arul helped bring together emergency managers, engineers, and public officials in Isle of Wight County on October 15, it marked the start of a coordinated effort to boost Virginia’s resilience to tornadoes and straight-line winds.

The Virginia Tornado and Straight-Line Wind Summit was the first statewide event of its kind, with more than 120 participants determined to address Virginia’s growing risks from severe wind events.

Arul emphasized the importance of broadening the state’s focus on wind-related hazards beyond hurricanes. “Tornados and straight-line winds are often overlooked,” she said. “Yet, they cause far more frequent damage than most people realize.”

Hosted by Isle of Wight County and organized by Virginia Tech’s Charles E. Via, Jr. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Old Dominion University’s Virginia Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation Center (VMASC) and School of Public Service, the summit represented a powerful coordination of science, engineering, and service.

Under Arul’s co-leadership, the event drew an impressive mix of emergency managers, public information officers, engineers, researchers, meteorologists, and state agency officials from across Virginia.

Throughout the day, participants explored cutting-edge approaches to forecasting, communication, infrastructure design, and community preparedness. The discussions reflected the urgency of understanding and mitigating wind hazards that, while often overshadowed by hurricanes, can be just as destructive to Virginia’s communities and infrastructure.

“Our goal is to shift the conversation from predicting the storm to understanding its power and strengthening the systems that protect Virginia communities,” said Arul.

With Virginia Tech’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering serving as a major sponsor, alongside Dominion Energy and Climate Inc., the summit underscored Virginia Tech’s leadership in advancing collaboration between academia, government, and industry to build a more resilient Virginia. In future years, the planners hope to have participation at the summit from all universities in Virginia.

Building on this year’s success, organizers plan to establish the summit as a recurring event driving statewide progress in wind resilience and preparedness.

WERISE Lab Leads Wind Hazard Mitigation in the Commonwealth of Virginia

Dr.Monica Arul leads small group discussions during the Hazard Mitigation Planning group meeting.

Every year, Virginia faces the powerful forces of hurricanes, tornadoes, and straight-line winds. While the state’s Hazard Mitigation Plan identifies these extreme wind events as significant threats, there have been no mitigation actions specifically dedicated to them — until now.

Invited by the Virginia Department of Emergency Management, Dr. Monica Arul, led the Hazard Mitigation Working Group meeting at the Liberty Mountain Conference Center in Lynchburg in February, 2025. This meeting marked a turning point in how Virginia prepares for and mitigates extreme wind threats, setting the stage for long-overdue action. She offered her expertise to the discussion of extreme wind events, guiding the development of targeted mitigation actions aimed at hardening critical infrastructure, strengthening warning systems, and improving forecasting.

There were nearly 40 stakeholders in attendance including representatives from planning district commissions, Virginia Department of Emergency Management, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, university emergency managers, the American Red Cross, Virginia Housing and Community Development, and other key organizations.

Virginia has its own "tornado alley," where clusters of past tornadoes have been recorded across south-central, southeast, and Northern Virginia. Damage from derechos and microbursts also is well documented annually. Hurricanes are ranked as a high-risk hazard and tornadoes and straight-line winds as medium-high risk, but the state has yet to assign dedicated mitigation actions to these extreme wind events.

Virginia’s "Tornado alley." Graphic courtesy of Allen et al. (2021), ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf.

As the lead facilitator, Arul worked closely with stakeholders in small groups to develop key, measurable mitigation actions such as expanding tornado warning systems to reach vulnerable populations, ensuring mobile and manufactured homes are properly tied down through improved code enforcement and public awareness campaigns, and conducting pre-storm pruning and tree risk assessments to minimize windborne debris and infrastructure damage. The proposed actions will be reviewed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and, if approved, will be included in the commonwealth's next Hazard Mitigation Plan revision, due in 2028.

A major breakthrough from this meeting is the potential introduction of a new category — W for Wind — into Virginia’s hazard mitigation planning framework. Currently, mitigation actions are categorized under hazards such as Flooding (FL), Wildfire (WF), Pandemic (P), and Space Weather (S), among others.

A tornado summit on the horizon

This meeting is not a one-time event: Virginia’s Hazard Mitigation Plan is revised every five years, ensuring that mitigation strategies evolve with emerging data and risks. In addition to contributing to the next state plan update, Arul is taking immediate action by planning a tornado summit in partnership with the Department of Emergency Management in the fall. Arul visited tornado-affected areas in Isle of Wight and Gloucester counties, where emergency managers guided her through the devastation of past tornadoes. She spoke with first responders, homeowners, and farmers who were severely impacted by the tornadoes.

Tornado damage in Gloucester County in 2011. Photo courtesy of the National Weather Service.

The tornado’s path was still evident, marked by broken trees across the landscape. One of the key reasons for Arul’s visit was her research interest in the vulnerabilities of mobile and manufactured homes to high winds, particularly given their high concentration in these counties, where they account for approximately 16 to 20 percent of housing units — well above the national average. Improving the resilience of mobile and manufactured homes emerged as a top priority during hazard mitigation planning discussions.

The upcoming tornado summit in October 2025 will bring together stakeholders, local officials, and emergency managers to further assess Virginia’s tornado risks, explore mitigation strategies, and develop concrete plans to strengthen the state’s manufactured housing stock. As interest in extreme wind mitigation grows, this summit will serve as a crucial platform for knowledge-sharing, collaboration, and action. Building on the progress from this working group meeting, Virginia is poised to take a more proactive stance in addressing the risks of hurricanes, tornadoes, and straight-line winds.

Best Journal Paper Award from the American Association for Wind Engineering (AAWE)

Dr. Monica Arul (right), Director of the WERISE Lab, receives the Best Journal Paper Award from the American Association for Wind Engineering (AAWE) at the 15th Americas Conference on Wind Engineering in St. Louis, Missouri. The award, presented by Dr. Ahsan Kareem (left), honors her paper titled “Machine learning-based automated identification of thunderstorms from anemometric records using shapelet transform.”