About this Research Topic
Natural hazards in the form of earthquakes, windstorms, and associated events such as tsunami and storm surge can be devastating to the civil infrastructure of a community and highly disruptive to the broader society. As evidenced by experiences from the Indian Ocean tsunamis, the Canterbury earthquake sequence in New Zealand, the Tohoku tsunami in Japan, and Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, Harvey and Maria in the US, communities can take years to recover from widespread damage to, or failures of, civil infrastructure.
The Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) is a distributed, multi-user, national facility that provides the natural hazards engineering and social science community with a network of state-of-the-art laboratories, computational modeling and simulation center, convergence-science and research network support, and cyberinfrastructure. The community of NHERI researchers, educators, and students encompasses a large group of universities, industry partners, and research institutions in the United States and abroad. The objectives of NHERI are to more effectively collect and publish data, with access to high performance computing resources for computational simulation, and a network coordination office leading 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 storm surge in coastal areas.
Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), NHERI enables researchers to physically test and numerically simulate groundbreaking concepts to protect people and communities - including homes, businesses, civil infrastructure and infrastructure lifelines. This work enables engineering and scientific innovations to help prevent natural hazards from becoming societal disasters.
About the Research Topic:
This special collection describes the unique capabilities of each of the twelve NHERI components. Collectively, the papers illustrate the power of shared-use facilities and components in terms of encouraging multi- and interdisciplinary research collaboration. The contributions also highlight how open access to data and high-performance computing resources can advance the state of knowledge cutting across disciplinary borders, and advancing convergence science to solve grand challenges to improve the resilience of communities against the impact of natural hazards.
The content of this collection points to the enabling power and breadth of the impact of the activities of researchers, students, educators, and practitioners collaborating in NHERI. The collaborative research and educational efforts have fostered the development of future earthquake, wind, and coastal engineering researchers as well as practicing engineers and social science researchers, has resulted in a wealth of invaluable experimental data, and continues to produce transformational research and outcomes that impact engineering and, increasingly, interdisciplinary practice from computational simulation models to design guidelines and codes.
Introduction by:
Arindam Chowdhury, Florida International University
Joel Conte, University of California at San Diego
Forrest Masters, University of Florida
Julio Ramirez, Purdue University
James Ricles, Lehigh University
Keywords: natural hazards, nheri, earthquakes, hurricanes, windstorms, storm surge, tsunami
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.