Friday, October 14, 2016

Thinking about designing greenhouses to withstand hurricane force winds

Since this will be a growing problem many places around the world I started thinking about this.

Basically, I could see two or more ways to to this. The first would be the easiest where you dig down about 3 feet below the surface of the ground or you build up burms three feet high or so around some fields to try to cut down damage from high winds when they occur. When winds are going to be more regular above 70 mph or more you could create frames with see through plastic on top for when it wasn't raining there to keep leaves on plants from blowing off.

In really really windy areas where 100 mph winds might occur once or more a month likely 10 foot deep areas where you build and entire greenhouse with the roof level with the surface of the land. However, then if you had flooding this might be a problem too because your greenhouse then becomes a lake.

So, likely building up a 10 foot high burm of dirt and or rocks and building your green houses level with the land and using the dirt or rock burm to shelter from the wind as well as the structure of the green house might be best where flooding might occur as well as high winds.

I envision a rectangle shaped burm with an enclosed Greenhouse big enough for workers to walk inside to care for plants and some way to open the roof in lower winds to let the rain in as well. The burm would be even with the (flat?) roof of the green house.

However, then what if high winds and rains occurred at the same time?

So, depending upon what kind of weather you get where you live the designs of these greenhouses would have to be custom made for the specific weather needs of your areas of the earth.

1 comment:

xyz said...

Thanks for your sharing....