Melissa Burton
Principal
I am the Canada Consulting Practice Leader and Principal based in Arup’s Toronto office. My technical work at Arup focuses on climate modelling and wind engineering applications. I have served as senior technical expert on many international projects where I have optimized design and reduced wind loads for large roof structures, buildings and bridges.
I have extensive experience using large volumes of data to develop climate models for wind codes; investigating the interaction of wind and the built environment. My technical expertise extends to the use of advanced analytical tools to quantify and reduce design risk from wind and climate loading. In addition, I lead Arup’s Americas Wind Skills Network, and serve on the Board of Directors at the Applied Technology Council (ATC), whose mandate is to promote state of the art applications for use in mitigating the effects of natural hazards on the built environment.
I have most recently collaborated with the Charles Pankow Foundation to publish criteria and methodologies for performance and resilience-based wind design. This publication forms a pre-standard for wind design of buildings to the ASCE-7 design code. I have deep expertise in using tools to simulate wind flows, from wind tunnel testing to computational fluid dynamics through to water flumes. I serve on the ASCE7-49 committee setting standards for wind flow modelling.