Natural Hazards Reconnaissance With the NHERI RAPID Facility

Field reconnaissance data from GEER investigation of the 2018 MW 7.5 Palu-Donggala earthquake

“…Each GEER team member travelled with smartphones and/or tablets (with a beta version of the mobile data collection software RApp [4] ), which were used to take photographs of key earthquake and flowslide damage features in the region. Our effort focused on recording damage to structures, roadways, an irrigation canal that ran along the eastern edge of the valley, and to agricultural fields found throughout the flowslide region.…”

“…The archived data is organized into three general categories. The first category includes geotagged photographs collected by individual team members using handheld cameras, the mobile software application RApp [4] , and UAVs. These photographs are organized into folders by the last name of the team member that took the photographs and then by location (e.g., Jono Oge) or category (e.g., sand boils as shown in Fig.…”

“…Our field team consisted of five U.S.-based members, who were sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation-supported Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance (GEER) organization [3] , in collaboration with geologists, geotechnical engineers, and other researchers from Indonesia's Center for Earthquake Studies (PusGen) and the Indonesian Society of Geotechnical Engineers (HATTI) [this international team is collectively referred to as the Palu Earthquake “; GEER ” team]. The GEER team arrived at Palu City on 13 November 2018 and conducted five days of extensive fieldwork using instrumentation from the Natural Hazards Reconnaissance Facility (known as the “RAPID”) [4 , 5] , including mobile data collection software, digital imaging systems, high-resolution Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) antennas, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, or “;drones”). The resulting dataset includes over 2000 geotagged photographs, UAV images, ground coordinates, and other field measurements and observations, as well as associated post-processed geospatial data products (point clouds, digital surface models, orthomosaic images).…”

StEER: A Community-Centered Approach to Assessing the Performance of the Built Environment after Natural Hazard Events

“…More importantly, the arrival of the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) signaled a departure from the historical silos separating hazards and disciplines by offering communal research infrastructure. Event responses could now be backed by investments in shared hardware for field data collection (Berman et al, 2020), cyberinfrastructure for streamlined data curation (Rathje et al, 2017;Pinelli et al, 2020), and opportunities for data re-use to inform backend computational simulations (Deierlein et al, 2020). With the arrival of NHERI Converge and its network of extreme events reconnaissance and research (EER) organizations (Peek et al, 2020), StEER and GEER both have new potentials for interdisciplinary investigations and longitudinal studies.…”

“…These targets are also compiled in a Google Map as demonstrated by the case of Hurricane Dorian in Figure 3 (see additional example from Hurricane Laura in Supplementary Figure S2). This phase also works closely with the NHERI RAPID Facility (Berman et al, 2020) to obtain necessary hardware (discussed in Hardware Platforms), depending on the adopted field response strategy (discussed in Field Response Strategies).…”