Resilience$32 million NSF grants for improving prediction of, response to natural disasters
With Sandy’s one-year anniversary – 29 October – next week, how do scientists better predict and respond to natural hazards such as hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, and wildfires? To find answers, the National Science Foundation (NSF) recently awarded twelve new research grants totaling $32 million. The awards will advance understanding of natural hazards and of technological hazards linked with natural phenomena, as scientists study ways of predicting and responding to hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, wildfires.
Sandy: the deadliest and most destructive hurricane of the 2012 Atlantic hurricane season and the second-costliest hurricane in U.S. history. Damage estimates from the storm surpass $68 billion, a total exceeded only by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
With Sandy’s one-year anniversary – 29 October – next week, how do scientists better predict and respond to natural hazards such as hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, and wildfires?
To find answers, the National Science Foundation (NSF) recently awarded twelve new grants totaling $32 million through its Interdisciplinary Research in Hazards and Disasters solicitation. The effort is part of NSF’s Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability (SEES) investment.
Hazards SEES is funded by several NSF directorates: Geosciences; Engineering; Social, Economic and Behavioral Sciences; Mathematical and Physical Sciences; and Computer and Information Science and Engineering.
An NSF release reports that the awards will advance understanding of natural hazards and of technological hazards linked with natural phenomena. They will also improve capabilities for predicting these hazards, mitigating their effects, and enhancing the capacity to respond to and recover from natural disasters.
The NSF notes that Hazards SEES projects cross the boundaries of the atmospheric and geospace, earth and ocean sciences; computer and information science; cyberinfrastructure; engineering; mathematics, and statistics; and social, economic, and behavioral sciences.
“Through the Hazards SEES program, NSF has made investments in research that will reduce the impact of natural hazards, enhance safety, and contribute to sustainability,” says Roger Wakimoto, NSF assistant director for Geosciences.
“When we face such impending disasters as Hurricane Sandy or the Oklahoma tornadoes, it’s critical that we have already developed ways of responding to and recovering from such devastating events.”
Hazards SEES scientists and engineers will conduct research on such topics as the integration of natural, human, and infrastructure systems for hurricane evacuation and sheltering; volcanic crises in the United States: from precursors to resilience; next-generation warning systems for tornadoes and flash floods; and magnitude 9 earthquake scenarios: modeling, warnings and response and resilience in the Pacific Northwest.
Other projects include predicting landslide hazards; promoting regional resilience to repeated heat waves and hurricanes; preventing flood hazards from becoming disasters through communication of parcel-level flood risk; and developing monitoring, prediction and resilience cyberinfrastructure for wildfires.
“We hope to find new ways of ‘beating the storm,’” says Wakimoto, “in whatever form it may arrive.”
2013 Hazards SEES awards
- Hazards SEES Type 2: WIFIRE: A scalable data-driven monitoring, dynamic prediction and resilience cyberinfrastructure for wildfires: Ilkay Altintas, University of
