NHDR fills a niche where technological advances in weather detection, warning systems, and model predictions are used to mitigate disasters resulting from severe weather.
The focus of NHDR is to identify and characterize natural hazards, foster development of engineered systems that rely on measurement and detection, predictive models, and information systems. Better information means better decisions and therefore reduces losses due to severe weather, drought, and flooding. NHDR's research is focused on reducing societal impacts of severe weather.
Through natural disaster reduction, a disaster resilient society will result through three major principles:
The center's vision is to identify technological solutions that would make society more resilient to natural hazards, thereby reducing or mitigating the disastrous impacts of drought and extreme temperatures on water resources, damaging winds, heavy precipitation, and flooding. If every community could withstand these forces of nature and sustain minimal damage, a safer and more sustainable place to live would result.
NHDR's current projects include working on components of the CASA Engineering Research Center related to space-time scales of quantitative rainfall measurements in relation to the predictablility of flooding.
Another area of interest to the center is the promotion of weather resistant building practices in the Great Plains.
Projects include development of a natural and disaster information center for the Country of Paraguay with funding from the Interamerican Development Bank.
Symposia have been organized by NHDR to focus attention of structural and non-structural measures to reduce societal vulnerability to severe weather. Emphasis is placed on building measures that allow society to reduce property damage and loss of life. Integrated warning systems designed for site-specific hazard warnings benefit from analysis of the hazards in terms of frequency, watershed characteristics, and flood prone areas.
Click here to see a one-page summary of NHDR from the Weather Sphere website.