Dynamic response of structures to thunderstorm outflows taking directionality effects into account

Due to the combinate effect of the background wind, the translation of the downburst and the radial nature of the jet after the touchdown, a peculiar characteristic of a signal associated to a thunderstorm outflow measured by an anemometer is the potential variation of direction during the life of the event. Despite this situation, the study of the dynamic response of structures to thunderstorm outflows has traditionally neglected the angle of attack and the effects induced by that, implicitly assuming the response as alongwind. This paper proposes two methods to consider the role of the direction and its possible variation into the evaluation of dynamic response of structures subjected to Aeolian events. In particular, the second one is based on a decomposition method of the wind speed which constitutes a generalization of what historically defined for stationary events. Thus, it allows to establish a robust parallelism between the dynamic response due to synoptic winds and thunderstorm outflows.