The Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as a distributed, multi-user national facility that provides the natural hazards research community with access to research infrastructure which includes earthquake and wind engineering experimental facilities, cyberinfrastructure, computational modeling and simulation tools, and research data, as well as education and community outreach activities.

NHERI Experimental Facilities provides access to their experimental resources, user services, and data management infrastructure for NSF-supported research and education awards. This award supports a NHERI Experimental Facility at Oregon State University with two major experimental resources, the large wave flume (LWF) and the directional wave basin (DWB), for conducting fundamental research to understand and reduce risks to civil infrastructure from windstorm surge and tsunami hazards. Research conducted at this facility enable breakthrough discoveries that increases community resilience to coastal windstorms and tsunamis and provides new mitigation strategies to increase system robustness and future adaptation strategies that will improve the rate of the post-disaster recovery. 

Both, the LWF and the DWB can be used for the study of hydraulic-structure-sediment phenomena, such as tsunami and hurricane inundation dynamics in constructed and natural environments; tsunami and hurricane wave forces on near-coast civil infrastructure; and tsunami and hurricane surge interaction with sediments causing erosion and localized scour.

Under this program, the Large Wave Flume and the Directional Wave Basin at HWRL have become the NHERI Experimental Facility for Hurricane Wave/Surge and Tsunami Hazards, or NHERI-CWST-EF.

DesignSafe-ci.org is the cyberinfrastructure (CI) component of NHERI. The DesignSafe infrastructure will provide a comprehensive environment for experimental, theoretical, and computational engineering and science. On DesignSafe you can find all related information and access to the NHERI Community, ongoing Research, NHERI Experimental Facilities, as well as Training and Outreach resources. Please visit DesignSafe to begin your NHERI discovery journey.

Learn more about NHERI and the grant at OSU/CCE.

 Coastal Wave/Surge and Tsunami Experimental Facility First Workshop. Nov 12-13, 2015

On November 12 and 13th, 2015, the first NHERI EF Workshop was held by the Coastal Wave/Surge and Tsunami Experimental Facility (NHERI-CWST-EF), at OSU in Corvallis, OR.

The objectives of the Workshop considered:

  • To increase the understanding of how the NHERI EF can be used for research in engineering for natural hazards, and
  • Discuss the scientific vision for the use of the NHERI EF in the broader context of the NHERI program, including numerical simulations, cyberinfrastructure, and field observation

The Workshop should increase the number of potential users for conducting transformative research on coastal resilience using the NHERI Experimental Facility for Hurricane Wave/Surge and Tusnami Hazards and other NHERI components.

During the Workshop, the NSF Engineering for Natural Hazards (ENH) program was discussed, which includes the NHERI program and its timeline for funding. Besides, research needs and knowledge gaps in Coastal Engineering for Natural Hazards, as well as the NHERI Science Plan, were thouroughly reviewed. Finally, the NHERI-CWST-EF was visited during the Workshop, where the resource availability, instrumentation, data acquisition, cyberinfrastructure, and examples of previous related projects were included in the discussion program.

A PDF presentation with the technical description of the experimental resources, as well as the presented examples of previous projects can be downloaded here (80 MB).