SEES Fellows: Improved prediction of landfalling impacts of tropical cyclones - Applications for establishing more resilient electricity infrastructure systems

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The project is supported under the NSF Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability Fellows (SEES Fellows) program, with the goal of helping to enable discoveries needed to inform actions that lead to environmental, energy and societal sustainability while creating the necessary workforce to address these challenges. Sustainability science is an emerging field that addresses the challenges of meeting human needs without harm to the environment, and without sacrificing the ability of future generations to meet their needs. A strong scientific workforce requires individuals educated and trained in interdisciplinary research and thinking, especially in the area of sustainability science. With the SEES Fellowship support, this project will enable a promising early career researcher to establish himself in an independent research career related to sustainability. This project addresses the challenge of increasing the resilience of the electric power infrastructure system to cascading hazards triggered by land falling tropical cyclones. The objective is to support better management of the associated risks and the development of more resilient networks of critical infrastructures. This project advances the science of probabilistic prediction of hurricanes and their landfall impacts, develops a new methodology for decadal projections of extreme weather events, and develops a meta-networks system framework for assessing the coupled costs/benefits of proposed strategies for hardening infrastructure in response to cascading hurricane hazards in conjunction with broader strategies for resilience and sustainability. This project aims to reduce the impact of tropical cyclones on electricity system infrastructures through engagement with regional power providers and emergency managers. The impacts from this research will support evaluation of the cost effectiveness of public and private investments in both short- and long-term initiatives dedicated to strengthening critical infrastructure and electric grid resilience.