NICHE
The Societal Toll
The United States is recurringly exposed to weather-related disasters, such as hurricanes and severe windstorms, resulting in mounting financial and human losses as a result of strong winds, and, in coastal areas, the combined effect of wind, waves and storm surge. Our aging infrastructure, variable adoption and enforcement of the latest model building codes, and continued development of communities in the most hazard-exposed areas has only escalated the risk of such losses.
With billion dollar storm events becoming increasingly common, generating annual losses of over $100 billion in recent years, insurance safety nets are fraying and federal disaster funds are depleted. There is a pressing national imperative to promote more resilient communities to reduce the financial and human toll of weather-related disasters.
U.S. lacks research infrastructure that can (1) accurately simulate the impacts of natural hazards on coastal communities at the scales and intensities and (2) seamlessly support more integrated research that couples field observations, experiments, and computational modeling. Such an infrastructure is necessary to respond authentically simulate the catastrophic failures observed in recent storms.
NICHE responds to this need
NICHE brings the vital capability to simulate the individual and combined impact of wind, waves, and surge at unprecedented scales and intensities, physically studying their dynamic actions on the built and natural environment...and computationally examining societal impacts at the community to regional scale.
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NICHE will provide versatility in configurations, scales, and intensities necessary to more faithfully simulate the effects of natural hazards on the built and natural environment, bringing a Convergence Research infrastructure that integrates physical experiments, computational modeling and field observations to spur breakthrough discovery.
NICHE's stakeholder engagement and research translation programming promises to speed reduction of losses by up to four different pathways, (1) spurring code reforms, (2) promoting proactive mitigation investments, (3) commercializing new mitigation products and (4) mainstreaming state-of-the-art risk forecasting.
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As such, NICHE is envisioned to engage a wide user base including but not limited to wind and coastal hazards, critical infrastructure, insurance, offshore systems, and oceanography working on key research areas to achieve broad societal impacts.