Wind tunnels have been invaluable tools for assessing the susceptibility of building materials to wind damage and providing insurers with data to better predict losses and promulgate property rates. But wind tunnels have an inherent limitation when it comes to modeling a hurricane's effects: They can't test full-scale buildings.

"Wind tunnels rely on models that shape the geometry of buildings, but they cannot test all individual [building] elements because not all of those elements can be brought down to size," says Dr. Arindam Gan Chowdhury, assistant professor in the civil and environmental engineering department at Florida International University (FIU) in Miami. It's also difficult to conduct destructive testing in a wind tunnel for fear of damaging the tunnel itself.

Therefore, FIU's International Hurricane Research Center (IHRC) devised a plan to use an array of seven-foot industrial fans to simulate hurricane conditions in an external testing environment. Phase one of the plan, a two-fan prototype funded by the Florida Department of Community Affairs, was completed in early 2005 and successfully used to test full-scale roof models under wind and wind-driven water conditions.