SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “DISASTER”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

SourceResearch connectionFrom yearThrough year

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 469 records · Page 26

All sources NASA NTRS DOE OSTI

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Probabilistic Blast Damage Modeling Uncertainties and Sensitivities

Blast overpressure is the predominant source of ground damage posed by potentially hazardous asteroid strikes. Estimates of the extent, severity, and likelihoods of potential blast damage regions will be one of the key metrics needed to mount civil defense or disaster response plans in the face of an impending impact. However, there are many inherent sources of uncertainty in evaluating the damage, both in characterizing the properties of the incoming object and in the approaches used to model the entry/impact and resulting damage, which make it difficult to produce a single ‘accurate’ or ‘best guess’ prediction of ground damage. The current 2021 PDC hypothetical impact scenario poses a particular challenge due to its short warning time. The need for rapid disaster response to prepare for an immanent impact, combined with lack of observational opportunities to refine basic knowledge about the object’s basic size and properties, make understanding the range and relative likelihood of consequences particularly critical. The potential damage caused by these blasts can be evaluated using a range of modeling and simulation approaches and levels of fidelity. Fast-running engineering-level models can be used to run large numbers of probabilistically sampled cases covering wide variations of uncertain properties or parameters. High-fidelity simulations, on the other hand, can capture more detailed/accurate blast physics, but can only be performed for a small selection of specific cases, requiring many assumptions to be made about the initial object and its unpredictable entry/breakup characteristics. In order to provide a more complete picture of the potential threat for effective disaster response, both types of analysis need to be employed together. In this approach, high-fidelity simulations are used to refine and anchor engineering models, and the probabilistic engineering models are used to evaluate broad parameters spaces and guide selection of the most pertinent simulation cases for a given scenario. This presentation expands upon the probabilistic asteroid impact risk assessments being performed as part of the 2021 PDC hypothetical impact exercise, focusing on key aspects of blast damage modeling uncertainties and sensitivities. We review the current modeling and simulation approaches employed in the current assessment, compare the relative levels of uncertainty stemming from each main element of the problem (i.e., knowledge of the asteroid properties, modeling of the atmospheric entry/breakup and airburst, and estimates of the ground damage from the resulting blasts waves), and highlight any notable trends and sensitivities for the current scenario case.

SMD↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Initial Exploration of STEReO (Scalable Traffic management for Emergency Response Operations) system user requirements for safe integration of small UAS

Environment-based disasters, such as wildfire, can cause substantial loss of life and loss of property and are costing billions of dollars annually. Existing disaster response operations are complex, with many challenges. The aim of the Scalable Traffic management for Emergency Response Operations (STEReO) system is to demonstrate the application of technologies that will enable small, low-altitude Unmanned Aerial System operations to safely take place in the airspace above a disaster event, increasing the effectiveness of the response. As a first step, the project aims to build a small prototype to demonstrate and test the core functions of this system based on user needs and requirements that were gathered from experts in the field during discussions and walkthroughs.

STEReO↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Lessons learned from replicating services for flood prediction and monitoring in Asia to the assessment of hurricane impacts in Central America

In October and November 2020, two dangerous back-to-back hurricanes, Eta and Iota, made landfall in Central America. The SERVIR program - a joint effort of NASA and the U.S. Agency for International Development, and whose motto is “connecting space to village” was able to leverage two tools originally developed for use in other regions for predicting and assessing the flood impacts of the hurricanes. The GEOGLoWS Streamflow Prediction tool - originally implemented in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region - was used for predicting potential flooding ahead of landfall by Eta and Iota. In conjunction, the Hydrologic Remote Sensing Analysis for Floods (HYDRAFloods) framework - originally developed along with SERVIR-Mekong - was used for post-event flood mapping, leveraging its ability to map floods in cloud-covered areas using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery from the Copernicus program. Both tools were used in support of disaster coordination efforts being led by the Central American Regional Disaster Prevention Center (CEPREDENAC), in conjunction with its sister agency, the Regional Water Resources Committee (CRRH). The support provided to regional entities - and to their stakeholder national governments - served as an example of rapid generation of Earth observation products for disaster response. Feedback on those products was also provided, especially in terms of the implications of (i) calibration of predicted river volumes, and (ii) the latency of the input Earth observation imagery and attempts to map the floods’ maximum extents. An upcoming NASA DEVELOP project will also seek to strengthen the capability of CEPREDENAC and CRRH to apply HYDRAFloods for future extreme events. The application of the tools also provides a useful case study on capacity building, in terms of how Earth observation data and models can be replicated across regions.

Capacity building↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Developing an Unmanned Aircraft System Pilot (UASP-kit) for Wildland Fire UAS Operators

The use of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) to support disaster management is becoming more widespread. Uninhibited by many of the operational constraints imposed on crewed aircraft, UAS have the potential to augment the aerial response in a number of ways, including supporting situation awareness, thereby accelerating disaster management efforts. The intent of the Scalable Traffic management for Emergency Response Operations (STEReO) activity is to build an ecosystem that will allow small UAS (sUAS) operations to fly safely in the airspace during disaster management events. The first step toward this goal is to develop a small, single-user tool (the UASP-kit) that will enhance an sUAS pilot’s situation awareness of the airspace. User needs for the functions and features of this tool were collected during a walkthrough over multiple days with subject matter experts from the US Forest Service. A prototype of the UASP-kit was then taken on an extended demonstration to multiple users, who were able to interact with it. User feedback was largely positive and users discussed the information they needed to support situation awareness in context. The demonstration also highlighted features that were unintuitive to use, and functions that need to be modified to make the kit more user-friendly and robust.

STEReO↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Developing an Unmanned Aircraft System Pilot Kit (UASP-kit) for Wildland Fire UAS Operators

STEReO↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Advanced Capabilities for Emergency Response Operations (ACERO)

STEReO↗

DOE OSTI2012

Rapid Damage eXplorer (RDX): A Probabilistic Framework for Learning Changes From Bitemporal Images

Recent decade has witnessed major changes on the Earth, for example, deforestation, varying cropping and human settlement patterns, and crippling damages due to disasters. Accurate damage assessment caused by major natural and anthropogenic disasters is becoming critical due to increases in human and economic loss. This increase in loss of life and severe damages can be attributed to the growing population, as well as human migration to the disaster prone regions of the world. Rapid assessment of these changes and dissemination of accurate information is critical for creating an effective emergency response. Change detection using high-resolution satellite images is a primary tool in assessing damages, monitoring biomass and critical infrastructures, and identifying new settlements. In this demo, we present a novel supervised probabilistic framework for identifying changes using very high-resolution multispectral, and bitemporal remote sensing images. Our demo shows that the rapid damage explorer (RDX) system is resilient to registration errors and differing sensor characteristics.

Change detection↗

DOE OSTI2015

The Case for the Use of Active Social Media in Nonproliferation and Nuclear Security

A great amount of attention and consideration is being directed at possible applications of social media in many challenging areas. The use of social media has already shown its importance in the area of disaster response, where, each citizen is essentially acting as a sensor in reporting local conditions. In the aggregate, valuable information is obtained to enable a more effective response as well as provide timely information to those in the disaster area. No one needs to be trained to understand what constitutes a disaster, so a social media data stream from the public is literally always active and ready to engage. A similar but more focused approach is the use of crowdsourcing for science, where specific challenges in areas such as mathematics, astronomy, and biology are posted to social media and solved by the crowd.

Schanfein, Mark J.↗

DOE OSTI2014

Recovery and Resilience in the Pacific Northwest

Around the world, communities are wrestling with what it means to be resilient enough to recover from a catastrophic disaster. Emergency management agencies have come to recognize that response and recovery are only two phases along the road to resilience and that there is no real dividing line between response and recovery. Some response activities will continue into the recovery phase; however, recovery preparations need to begin during the response phase if communities are to limit the damage to the economy, a key driver affecting resilience. Since its inception in 2007, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s (PNNL) Northwest Regional Technology Center (NWRTC) for Homeland Security in Seattle, Washington, has been working with state, local, and federal agencies; the private sector; and other organizations to develop approaches that foster resilience and support rapid recovery following an accidental, intentional, or natural disaster. This paper describes the NWRTC’s approach to building robust local and regional coalitions, shares some notable successes in improving recovery and increasing resilience, and identifies challenges and issues that still need to be addressed if communities are to be resilient in the face of disasters.

Resilience, Conference Proceedings, Recovery, NWRT↗

DOE OSTI2022

Alaska's First Thermalize Campaign: An Effort to Reduce Fuel Reliance in Juneau, AK

In 2018, the Bureau and City of Juneau set the goal of reaching 80% renewable energy in the sectors of transportation and space heating by 2045. This effort will minimize their reliance on fossil fuels, reduce their carbon footprint and increase their resilience in the event of a natural disaster as fuel oil reaches Juneau by boat and such shipments may be disrupted in a disaster. The community's resilience in the face of a disaster and lower carbon footprint goes hand-in-hand with public safety and health. The Cold Climate Housing and Research Center (CCHRC) partnered with several local and statewide groups, including Alaska Heat Smart and Information Insights, Inc, to lead Alaska's first thermalize campaign. Thermalize Juneau 2021 is an energy campaign working to lower the cost of heating homes in Juneau through beneficial electrification and increased energy efficiency. The goal of the campaign was to offer homeowners a streamlined and more affordable way to install heat pumps and energy efficiency improvements into their homes. Converting household heating from fuel to electricity also helps improve indoor and outdoor air quality and reduces maintenance requirements. The campaign had over 160 participants. As of Fall 2021, it is in its final stages of heat pump installations and energy efficiency improvements. In addition to tracking the energy savings and carbon reduction attributed to the campaign, the social equity was an important aspect. Thermalize Juneau attempted to include all the demographics present in Juneau in the campaign. The presentation will cover the goals and implementation of the campaign, current data on how it is improving community and household resilience, lessons learned, and next steps.

clean energy↗

DOE OSTI2022

Interacting with the COVID virus model in VR environment

The Disaster Response Complex at Idaho State University (ISU) hosts an annual Disaster Preparedness and Response Conference which will give a bird's eye view of disasters and pandemics in the U.S. We'll demonstrate virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) capabilities at the conference. This VR demo displays the structure and components of the COVID virus model, and let users to interact with it in an immersive environment. The 3D model used in this demo is open source and downloaded from this site: https://sketchfab.com/GLS.

3D↗

DOE OSTI2018

Residential Energy Efficiency and the Three Rs: Resistance, Resilience, and Recovery

The Building America Solution Center focuses primarily on providing best practices information on energy efficiency, indoor air quality, and water efficiency. While gathering information to address building practices that can improve disaster resistance, resilience, and recovery, it became apparent that there is a significant amount of overlap in areas of home construction related to energy efficiency and in areas related to resiliency. This paper will explore three areas where mutual goals and/or experience may be beneficial to both camps in meeting objectives related to efficient, resistant, resilient, and recoverable homes. The first is the common basis in building science that each industry must draw on to design and build adequate houses. This portion of the paper will include a discussion of photovoltaics. The second is the shared experiences each industry faces in market transformation and achieving changes in building codes. We will explore lessons that these industries may share around economic criteria, incentives, and prescriptive measures in code. And finally, this paper will address the role that insurance companies play in achieving changes in building practices related to energy efficiency and disaster planning.

residential, energy efficiency, disaster resistanc↗

DOE OSTI2018

The social vulnerability approach for social impact assessment

Highlights: • Social vulnerability is a process in two stages: the Structural and the Acquired.• SVA is apt for the diagnosis and management of social impacts caused by projects. • SVA is based on the Natural disaster and the Assets Based approaches. • Structural Vulnerability influences the very nature of the project. • Understanding the project as a possible hazard improves its analysis. - Abstract: The Social Impact Assessment (SIA) literature has highlighted the need to focus attention on the most vulnerable groups to improve the management of socio-environmental risk. However, methodological proposals to introduce vulnerability in SIAs are still incipient. The aim of this article is to present a proposal to analyze the role of social vulnerability in the production of risks generated by large infrastructure projects. Taking the theoretical-methodological advances made from the social vulnerability and natural disasters approach, and from the social vulnerability, development and poverty approaches, we have designed a Social Vulnerability Approach (SVA) which we aim at incorporating into the SIA of large infrastructure projects. To illustrate our methodological proposal, the case of the socio-environmental conflict generated by the HydroAysen Project (which entailed the construction of a set of hydroelectric dams on the Baker and Pascua rivers in the Chilean Patagonia region) has been selected. Our proposal allows us to identify elements of vulnerability throughout the whole project cycle and, therefore, windows for intervention in order to reduce social vulnerability as well as other kind of hazards that large infrastructure projects may generate on affected populations.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

DOE OSTI2016

Analyzing and sense making of human factors in the Malaysian radiation and nuclear emergency planning framework

The evolution of current Radiation and Nuclear Emergency Planning Framework (RANEPF) simulator emphasizes on the human factors to be analyzed and interpreted according to the stakeholder’s tacit and explicit knowledge. These human factor criteria are analyzed and interpreted according to the “sense making theory” and Disaster Emergency Response Management Information System (DERMIS) design premises. These criteria are corroborated by the statistical criteria. In recent findings, there were no differences of distributions among the stakeholders according to gender and organizational expertise. These criteria are incrementally accepted and agreed the research elements indicated in the respective emergency planning frameworks and simulator (i.e. 78.18 to 84.32, p-value <0.05). This paper suggested these human factors criteria in the associated analyses and theoretical perspectives to be further acomodated in the future simulator development. This development is in conjunction with the proposed hypothesis building of the process factors and responses diagram. We proposed that future work which implies the additional functionality of the simulator, as strategized, condensed and concise, comprehensive public disaster preparedness and intervention guidelines, to be a useful and efficient computer simulation.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

DOE OSTI2020

Where Is the Provenance? Ethical Replicability and Reproducibility in GIScience and Its Critical Applications

As replicability and reproducibility (R&R) crises develop within emerging convergent inquiry, ethical use of provenance information is central to the establishment and preservation of trust in critical applications of GIScience and geospatial technologies. Today large volumes of geospatial data are generated at high velocity from satellite sensors and unmanned aircraft systems, citizen sensors, geolocation-based data services, global navigation satellite systems, and so on. The extensive use of these data for applications such as disaster and humanitarian response raises the issue of R&R from competing perspectives of location privacy and geospatial data quality. Although geospatial data can be integrated and linked with contextual information to identify individuals’ movements, steps taken to ensure privacy can complicate the multiuser development of high-quality geospatial workflows. Provenance information as digital records of historical (retrospective) and potential future (prospective) geospatial processes is often overlooked, misunderstood, or inadequately addressed. We explore the relationship between provenance information, location privacy, and geospatial data quality in the context of R&R with a focus on disaster analytics. Here, we argue that in the era of big data and deep learning, GIScientists and associated institutions bear greater responsibility both for geospatial workflow quality and for location privacy. Given vastly heterogenous computational landscapes, we provide practical recommendations for ethically driven provenance and R&R research and development within the GIScience community and beyond.

96 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND PRESERVATION↗

DOE OSTI2025

Climate change and federal aid disbursements after Hurricane Harvey: an extreme event attribution analysis

The role climate change plays in increasing the burden placed on governments and insurers to pay for recovery has not been extensively explored and is the focus of this study. This study examines the impacts of climate change attributed flooding on federal disaster aid disbursement in Harris County, Texas following Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Our approach uses flood models to estimate the amount of flood damages attributable and not attributable to climate change under two climate change attribution scenarios from peer reviewed studies: 20% and 38% increases in rainfall associated with the hurricane due to climate change. These estimates are combined with census tract-level disbursement data for FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) and the Individual Assistance (IA) part of the Individuals and Households Program. We employ spatial lag regression models with direct and spatial spillover effects to analyze the relationship between a tract’s flood damages—both attributed and not attributed to climate change—and federal disaster aid. We find that both types of flood damage shape federal aid disbursements, but that climate change attributed damages tend to have larger effect sizes (elasticities) especially for IA. Specifically, for a 1% increase in additional climate change attributed damages per household in a census tract (under the 20% scenario), expected NFIP levels in that census tract are 0.26% higher and IA levels are 0.3% higher. Implications center on federal funding in an era of climate change.

FEMA↗

NASA NTRS2021

Severity of Drought and Heatwave Crop Losses Tripled Over the Last Five Decades in Europe

Extreme weather disasters (EWDs) can jeopardize domestic food supply and disrupt commodity markets. However, historical impacts on European crop production associated with droughts, heatwaves, floods, and cold waves are not well understood—especially in view of potential adverse trends in the severity of impacts due to climate change. Here, we combine observational agricultural data (FAOSTAT) with an extreme weather disaster database (EM-DAT) between 1961 and 2018 to evaluate European crop production responses to EWD. Using a compositing approach (superposed epoch analysis), we show that historical droughts and heatwaves reduced European cereal yields on average by 9% and 7.3%, respectively, associated with a wide range of responses (inter-quartile range +2% to −23%; +2% to −17%). Non-cereal yields declined by 3.8% and 3.1% during the same set of events. Cold waves led to cereal and non-cereal yield declines by 1.3% and 2.6%, while flood impacts were marginal and not statistically significant. Production losses are largely driven by yield declines, with no significant changes in harvested area. While all four event frequencies significantly increased over time, the severity of heatwave and drought impacts on crop production roughly tripled over the last 50 years, from −2.2% (1964–1990) to −7.3% (1991–2015). Drought-related cereal production losses are shown to intensify by more than 3% yr−1. Both the trend in frequency and severity can possibly be explained by changes in the vulnerability of the exposed system and underlying climate change impacts.

Extreme weather disasters↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

An Overview of Advanced Air Mobility Research at NASA

Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) will enable new types of aircraft to operate more cleanly, efficiently, and quietly, complemented by higher levels of autonomy and automation, and supported by air traffic management systems and infrastructure. The operations that these aircraft and systems are intended to conduct are designed to support missions that cover a varied set of use cases. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has been helping to lead the way in its AAM research through a broad portfolio of efforts that leverages multiple internal activities and external collaborations with industry and government. As the AAM concept has continued to advance, it has also become clear that there are very likely great benefits in its application to disaster response and the challenges posed by such complex events. In this application, NASA is leveraging its foundational work performed in partnership with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) on integrated unmanned and manned aircraft operations in disaster response situations. The joint NASA and JAXA work, along with the ongoing AAM efforts, have contributed to the formulation of a new project that will expand the scope of technology integration with an initial focus on wildland firefighting.

advanced air mobility↗