skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: 21-22 March 2022 Tornado Outbreak Field Assessment Structural Team Dataset
Observing damage and documenting successful performance of buildings and other structures. Classes include residential, commercial, and power infrastructure. Methodologies include detailed damage assessments in Fulcrum, deployment of UAS for high-resolution aerial imagery, and deployment of surface-level panoramic imaging devices. Hazard indicators were also captured.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2103550
PAR ID:
10513725
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; more » ; « less
Corporate Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
Designsafe-CI
Date Published:
Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
HazMapper Planning Documents Structural Assessments Hazard Indicators Daily Summaries Other Ground-Based Observations Unmanned Aerial Systems Street-Level Panoramic Imaging
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Observing damage and documenting successful performance of buildings and other structures. Classes include residential, commercial, and power infrastructure. Methodologies include detailed damage assessments in Fulcrum, deployment of UAS for high-resolution aerial imagery, and deployment of surface-level panoramic imaging devices. Hazard indicators were also captured.In the early morning hours of March 3, 2020, a strong tornado struck the City of Nashville and the surrounding metropolitan region with estimated maximum wind speeds of 165 mph. The tornado passed through Nashville and continued east for 53 miles, impacting the communities of Donelson, Mt. Juliet and Lebanon before lifting. The same storm system then produced a second tornado that struck Cookeville, TN with estimated wind speeds of 175 mph. The Nashville tornado was the third tornado that passed through the Five Points area of Nashville. Damage was reported across a diverse cross-section of buildings spanning a number of communities: Camden, Germantown/North Nashville, East Nashville/Five Points, Donelson, Mt. Juliet, Lebanon and Cookeville. Exposure of an urban metro area to this series of tornadoes resulted in significant impacts to power infrastructure and building performance ranging from loss of roof cover and broken windows to complete destruction. Affected typologies and building classes include single and multi-family wood framed homes, commercial construction (ranging from big box stores down to smaller restaurants/retail shops), airport and industrial buildings, and a number of schools. More gravely, these nocturnal tornadoes claimed two dozen lives and injured hundreds more. Given the loss of life and property in this event and the fact that the Nashville tornado sequence impacted an urban area with diverse building classes and typologies, this event offers an opportunity to advance our knowledge of structural resistance to strong winds, particularly given that new construction was among the inventory significantly damaged. This project encompasses the products of StEER's response to this event: Preliminary Virtual Reconnaissance Report (PVRR), Early Access Reconnaissance Report (EARR) and Curated Dataset. 
    more » « less
  2. This paper develops a probabilistic earthquake risk assessment for the electric power transmis- sion system in the City of Los Angeles. Via a dc load flow analysis of a suite of damage scenarios that reflect the seismic risk in Los Angeles, we develop a probabilistic representation for load shed during the restoration process. This suite of damage scenarios and their associated annual probabilities of occurrence are developed from 351 risk-adjusted earthquake scenarios using ground motion that collectively represent the seismic risk in Los Angeles at the census tract level. For each of these 351 earthquake scenarios, 12 damage scenarios are developed that form a probabilistic representation of the consequences of the earthquake scenario on the components of the transmission system. This analysis reveals that substation damage is the key driver of load shed. Damage to generators has a substantial but still secondary impact, and damage to transmission lines has significantly less impact. We identify the census tracts that are substantially more vulnerable to power transmission outages during the restoration process. Further, we explore the impact of forecasted increases in penetration of residential storage paired with rooftop solar. The deployment of storage paired with rooftop solar is represented at the census tract level and is assumed to be able to generate and store power for residential demand during the restoration process. The deployment of storage paired with rooftop solar reduces the load shed during the restoration process, but the distribution of this benefit is correlated with household income and whether the dwelling is owned or rented. 
    more » « less
  3. Post-disaster field observations of the built environment are critical for advancing fundamental research that links hazard data to structural performance, cascading community impacts, and the development of effective mitigation strategies. Yet, data collection remain fragmented across hazard types and infrastructure systems due to varying objectives, methodologies, protocols, and standards among investigators and organizations. To address this, a Unified Assessment Framework has been developed for standardized post-disaster hazard and structural assessment data and metadata collection across multiple natural hazards (earthquake, windstorm, coastal events) and infrastructure typologies. The framework encompasses a tiered performance assessment structure with increasing rigor and fidelity levels: Basic Assessment (BA), Load Path Assessment (LPA), and Detailed Component Assessment (DCA). The framework has been implemented as an open-access mobile application, the Structural Extreme Events Reconnaissance (StEER) Network’s StEER Unified App, hosted on Fulcrum data collection platform . Along with unification of data fields, preliminary mapping rules were developed to map out existing hazard-specific damage rating scales (e.g., wind, surge/flooding, rainwater ingress) to the European Macroseismic Scale (EMS-98) compatible unified damage scale, enabling consolidation of global damage ratings into a common data field, facilitating the unification of multiple hazards within a single app. In the mapping of damage ratings, overarching level definitions were retained (e.g., slight, moderate, severe damage) while customizing the specific descriptors to reflect hazard-specific damage mechanisms. Two use cases are presented to demonstrate the application of this framework through the StEER Unified App: a supervised pilot after the 2022 Hurricane Ian, Florida and an unsupervised deployment for the 2023 Turkey earthquake sequence. These deployments illustrate the framework’s flexibility and scalability, validate the feasibility of standardized assessments, and offer insights into how data quality is influenced by assessor pre-deployment training and assessment tier—particularly for complex tasks such as load path evaluation. This work advances the field by providing a scalable, standardized, and hazard-agnostic approach to structural field reconnaissance. The open-access framework and app support real-time deployments and enable integration of legacy datasets into a unified platform—laying the foundation for longitudinal analyses, cross-hazard comparisons, and expanded data reuse in the Natural Hazards Engineering community. 
    more » « less
  4. The Purdue Live Security Analyzer (PULSAR) is a state-of-the-art, high speed network monitoring and intrusion detection system designed to enhance the security of Purdue University's research cyberinfrastructure. PULSAR project goals include empowering domain scientists to conduct research at Purdue with heightened cybersecurity requirements and engaging undergraduate students through the design, deployment and operation of advanced cyberinfrastructure. Deployment strategies and design decisions are discussed, ultimately providing a recipe book for other institutions to use as a guide for effective implementation of a large scale intrusion detection system for Science DMZs. 
    more » « less
  5. This paper focuses on COSMOS ś Cloud enhanced Open Software defined MObile wireless testbed for city-Scale deployment. The COSMOS testbed is being deployed in West Harlem (New York City) as part of the NSF Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) program. It will enable researchers to explore the technology łsweet spotž of ultra-high bandwidth and ultra-low latency in the most demanding real-world environment. We describe the testbed’s architecture, the design and deployment challenges, and the experience gained during the design and pilot deployment. Specifically, we describe COSMOS’ computing and network architectures, the critical building blocks, and its programmability at different layers. The building blocks include software-defined radios, 28 GHz millimeter-wave phased array modules, optical transport network, core and edge cloud, and control and management software. We describe COSMOS’ deployment phases in a dense urban environment, the research areas that could be studied in the testbed, and specific example experiments. Finally, we discuss our experience with using COSMOS as an educational tool. 
    more » « less