Multi-Hazards Research

Multi-hazards research @ UO is lead by the Oregon Hazards Lab.  Please visit the OHAZ website to find out more about this talented, diverse, and passionate team.  If you are interested in any of the following, please contact us:

OHAZ Mission Statement

OHAZ uses science, technology, and community engagement to understand, detect, and mitigate multi-hazards within the Pacific Northwest.

OHAZ Vision Statement

Develop the most advanced all-hazards, environmental, and ecosystem observing platform in the United States to:

  • Provide physical, life, and social scientists with curated, open-access data that are the cornerstones of scientific discovery;
  • Deliver actionable and equitable information to the public, emergency managers, lifeline infrastructure providers, Tribal governments, and decision makers;
  • Simultaneously foster convergent research and build a disaster-resilient society.

Strategic Development of OHAZ

OHAZ is strategically developing a regional platform for resilience monitoring and scientific observing to achieve its vision and mission.  Our strategy is informed by the following:

  • Urgent societal needs are creating infrastructure to support resilience monitoring and alerting;
  • That infrastructure can be leveraged to advance education, public service, and basic research that relies on scientific observing;
  • Success is enabled by maximizing equitable access to information and by collaborating with regional stakeholders, policy makers, state and federal agencies, and the public/private sectors.

Also informing our strategic plan are the goals of the Provost’s Environmental Initiative and the Data Sciences Initiative.

Resilience monitoring supports alerting and includes OHAZ projects such as ShakeAlert for earthquake early warning and ALERTWildfire for wildfire detection and suppression. These projects share an IP network supporting systems of sensors (seismic sensors for ShakeAlert and pan-tilt-zoom cameras for ALERTWildfire) that are distributed across the western U.S. and deliver data to monitoring and alerting systems that provide products in real time. Both are public safety, public service projects that are mission driven and critical to improving society’s resilience to hazardous events.  For example, Oregon’s Public Health Hazard Vulnerability Assessment (Figure 1) shows that a Cascadia megathrust earthquake and wildfires represent the extrema of events in terms of Oregon’s public health consequences and 5-year hazard probability, respectively.  Mitigating the impacts of these events on society is a persistent need, thus funding and policy support for projects like ShakeAlert and ALERTWildfire will be ongoing for decades.

Figure 2: Integrative shared infrastructure is the backbone of Resilience Monitoring and Scientific Observing.  Advanced sensors, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and cyberinfrastructure are required to capture the spatial and temporal dynamics that are characteristic of environmental and ecosystem events.

Scientific observing is necessary to address fundamental questions about coupled natural and social systems (Figure 2). The U.S. research community, however, currently lacks the ability to record distributed, real-time and near-real-time sensor data that captures the spatial and temporal dynamics of environmentally driven events. OHAZ is leveraging its resilience monitoring infrastructure to collect data using a variety of project-specific sensors for research goals. These data will support crucial research to inform projections of these phenomena and processes, to provide actionable, equitable information to the public, and to mitigate the impacts of a changing climate on natural and social systems.

Stakeholder Collaboration: Creating a resilience monitoring and scientific observing platform requires sustained financial, logistical, and political support.  OHAZ tackles these issues by engaging with all stakeholders to establish broad policy-level support and a diverse funding portfolio.  For example, OHAZ was founded in November 2018 in response to Governor Brown’s policy agenda — Resiliency 2025: Improving our Readiness for the Cascadia Earthquake and Tsunami — which requested $12M to “implement a statewide emergency warning system by 2023 that ties multi-hazard events: earthquakes, wildland fires, landslides, and flooding events into one alerting and monitoring system.”  This policy initiative was informed by UO’s participation in the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, ShakeAlert, and ALERTWildfire.  OHAZ is currently writing a charter to establish an interoperable wildfire camera system in cooperation with the Governor’s office, Oregon Department of Forestry, Bureau of Land Management, National Forest Service, State Fire Marshall, Fire Chiefs, and the OR Alert system. Since 2018 OHAZ has received over $12.5M in state support and has successfully diversified its funding portfolio.