Mark Powell

Mark D. Powell is an atmospheric scientist and president of HWind Scientific, a tropical cyclone impact services startup located in Florida’s Capital City of Tallahassee. For over 30 years, Dr. Powell served as a scientist at NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division in Miami. There he focused on inventing the real-time hurricane wind analysis system (HWind), and conducting research in several other areas including air-sea interaction in extreme winds, new metrics for hurricane destructive potential, boundary layer wind structure in landfalling hurricanes, hurricane rainband dynamics, and development of standards for the measurement, analysis, and archival of hurricane surface wind fields. He also consults for the Florida Public Hurricane Loss Model and serves part-time as a research scientist with Florida State University’s Center for Ocean Atmospheric Prediction Studies. HWind products serve a variety of users including the insurance and energy industries, forecasters, emergency managers, storm surge-, wave-, risk-, and ecosystem modelers.
He has flown into 13 hurricanes and served as lead project scientist on hurricane research flights, the Genesis of Atlantic Lows Experiment, and the Tropical Experiment in Mexico. Dr. Powell received his BS and PhD degrees from the Florida State University and his MS from Penn State. He is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society, holds the AMS Certified Consulting Meteorologist designation, and has been awarded Gold and Bronze Medals from the U. S. Department of Commerce. He has published extensively in a variety of peer-reviewed journals including Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Geophysical Research, Monthly Weather Review, Weather and Forecasting, Journal of Wind Engineering and Industrial Aerodynamics, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Ocean Engineering, and Shore and Beach.