Spatiotemporal distribution characteristics of downburst in China

To provide the foundation for the wind loading selection in structural design, the spatiotemporal distribution characteristics of downburst were studied in this paper based on the observational data of 707 meteorological stations in China from 1971 to 2000. First, by analyzing the annual and monthly variations of the number of days and the time periods of downburst, the temporal distribution characteristic of the downburst was obtained. Then, the partition of downburst wind loading design was presented according to the annual average number of downburst days, with the spatial distributions of the number and period of downburst days in consideration. Finally, the number of days, the period and occurrence frequency of downbursts were statistically calculated in each zone. The wind loading of the downburst should be paid more attention in civil engineering to reduce the wind disaster.