A new Center, The Center for Land Surface Hazards (CLaSH), has been funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation to focus on the science of hazard cascades.
When hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes or other natural disasters occur in regions, the change they wreak upon the landscape can trigger other disastrous events such as landslides and flooding. But it has been difficult to predict how these events connect to one another, with what intensity and for how long the domino effect of related hazards, called cascading land surface hazards, will occur.
CLaSH will address this challenge in hazards research by developing new scientific frameworks and modeling tools to forecast and mitigate cascading hazards. CLaSH, headquartered at the University of Michigan, is a multi-institutional center and was awarded a five-year, $15 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation. The center will advance research on the fundamental science processes that cause landsliding, river erosion, debris flows and flooding.
Dimitrios Zekkos, professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental engineering, is a co-principal investigator of CLaSH and geotechnical engineer. He aims to gain insights on cascading hazards by using state-of-the-art technologies and computational tools. CLaSH will partner with Berkeley’s SimCenter to enable computing of these hazard cascades at scales that have not been attempted before. Simcenter’s PI and co-director, and professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental engineering, Professor Matt DeJong, participated in CLaSHʻs kick-off last week in Los Angeles.
“Recent technological advances in remote sensing, robots and sensors provide an unprecedented opportunity to monitor the geologic processes in a way that was completely impossible only a few years ago,” Zekkos said. “These advances paired with new computational tools such as artificial intelligence and regional geologic process simulations provide a truly unprecedented opportunity to advance our scientific understanding of how geologic processes are coupled and lead to geohazard cascades.”
Read the full press release https://news.umich.edu/u-m-awarded-15-million-nsf-grant-to-transform-the-science-of-natural-hazards/