Hurricane winds and storm surge present major hazards to many coastal areas in the United States (e.g., Hurricanes Andrew of 1992, Katrina of 2005, and Sandy of 2012). These hurricane hazards will likely intensify due to changing sea levels and climate conditions. Buildings and other civil infrastructure often have a service life of 50 years or longer, during which period they may be exposed to the effects of changing sea levels and climate conditions. However, current models for assessing structural performance often neglect these effects, as they are based on climate-invariant modeling of hurricane hazards and loads. The research goals of this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program grant are to investigate how hurricane wind and storm surge hazards can vary under changing climate conditions and to formulate a new framework to understand how this variation will impact structural performance. Case studies will be carried out for coastal megacities such as Boston, New York City, Miami, Tampa, and Galveston and will support increased coastal resiliency in the United States. The project will contribute to a next-generation workforce for mitigating the impact of hurricanes on structures by training, engaging, and motivating students of all levels and backgrounds.
This research will establish a new hurricane climatology model that can generate large numbers of synthetic storms with physically correlated characteristics (genesis, track, intensity, and size) driven by comprehensive observed or projected changing climate conditions. The hurricane climatology model will be coupled with advanced hazard modeling to investigate how hurricane wind and storm surge (including sea-level rise) hazards will vary individually and jointly in the future. A large synthetic database of joint hurricane wind and storm surge events under various projected climates will be generated for assessing lifetime structural performance and target probability of failure in the face of nonstationary wind and storm surge hazards varying with changing climate conditions. Wind and surge datasets and analytical tools generated by this research will be made available on the NSF-supported NHERI DesignSafe-CI.org web portal. In addition to actively engaging undergraduate and graduate students in the research, this project will integrate the research into an undergraduate risk analysis course and a graduate wind engineering course at Princeton University, and also establish a summer internship on coastal resilience for high school students.
