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Natural hazards engineering plays an important role in minimizing the effects of natural hazards 9 on society through the design of resilient and sustainable infrastructure. The DesignSafe 10 cyberinfrastructure has been developed to enable and facilitate transformative research in natural 11 hazards engineering, which necessarily spans across multiple disciplines and can take advantage 12 of advancements in computation, experimentation, and data analysis. DesignSafe allows researchers to more effectively share and find data using cloud services, perform numerical 14 simulations using high performance computing, and integrate diverse datasets such that researchers can make discoveries that were previously unattainable. This paper describes the design principles used in the cyberinfrastructure development process, introduces the main components of the DesignSafe cyberinfrastructure, and illustrates the use of the DesignSafe cyberinfrastructure in research in natural hazards engineering through various examples.

Current design wind loads for buildings and other structures are based upon model tests in low-speed boundary-layer wind tunnels that generate straight-line winds. Winds resulting from tornadoes that could occur during storm events such as thunderstorms or hurricanes differ greatly from conventionally-conceived atmospheric boundary-layer winds. This paper presents transient wind loads on a one-story gable-roofed building in a laboratory-simulated tornado and compares them with building code estimates. Tornadoes were simulated in smooth open terrain with vortex core diameters from 0.46 m to 1.06 m. A 1:100 scale model of a building with dimensions of 9.1m x 9.1m x 6.6 m and gable roof angle of 35° was used for this study. Comparisons of peak loads measured in this study showed that tornadoes of F2 strength would generate loads significantly greater than those prescribed by ASCE 7-05 for 40 m/s (90 mph), 3-sec gust, straight-line wind over open terrain.

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