Climate, Water and Infrastructure Resilience
Improving the resilience of communities and critical infrastructure to dynamic environmental hazards poses nontrivial scientific and engineering challenges. Improving Earth system modeling, refining our predictive capabilities, and advancing uncertainty quantification are critical steps to address these challenges. We focus on advancing a fundamental understanding of the interactions and nonlinear feedbacks between hydrology and other systems (such as climate, energy, urban, and infrastructure) to inform risk analysis and decision making. We address two interrelated questions: (i) How can we advance a predictive understanding of multiscale, multisector impacts, responses, and feedbacks of hydroclimatic extremes? (ii) How can we use this improved understanding of risk to inform hazard management, water resources planning and critical infrastructure design? We address these questions through interdisciplinary research at the interface of engineering, Earth science and data science.