The Network Coordination Office of NHERI (Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure)

Abstract

Since 2015, NHERI, or the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure, began research operations supported by the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) as a distributed, multiuser national facility that provides the natural hazards research community with access to a powerful research infrastructure. NHERI is comprised of separate research infrastructure awards for a Network Coordination Office (NCO), Cyberinfrastructure, a Computational Modeling and Simulation Center, eight Experimental Facilities, and CONVERGE (an initiative to advance social sciences and interdisciplinary research). Awards made for NHERI contribute to NSF's role in the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program and the National Windstorm Impact Reduction Program of the United States. The mission of NHERI is to provide the earthquake, wind, coastal engineering, and social sciences communities with access to research infrastructure, education, and community outreach activities focused on improving the resilience and sustainability of the civil infrastructure against earthquakes, windstorms, and associated natural events such as tsunami and coastal storm surge.

Research Needs, Challenges, and Strategic Approaches for Natural Hazards and Disaster Reconnaissance

“…For example, sensors could be installed on structures and earth systems to monitor response to aftershocks (Geli et al, 1988;Zhou et al, 2013), and aerial imagery could be used to validate the performance of wind-resistant roof covers. In 2017, the Network Coordination Office (Johnson et al, 2020) of NHERI convened a task group to prepare a networkwide science plan to guide future research and to focus investigators on keeping the communities and the built environment safe from natural hazards. The NCO's NHERI network science plan was first published in July 2017 (Smith et al, 2017) and reflected many of the principals of the National Research Council Grand Challenges report (National Research Council [NRC], 2011).…”