Hi CEE community,

Please join us this Thursday, January 11 at 3:30 in More Hall room 225 for this week’s water seminar where Dr. Michael Grilliot will present on UW’s RAPID facility. See the abstract for his talk along with Michael’s bio below.

Again, the class is offered for credit CEE 500. If you want a unit of credit, please register for the class.  You must attend at least 8 of the 10 seminars for class credit.  

However, all are welcome to attend, regardless of enrollment.

RAPID Facility: Natural Hazards and Disaster Reconnaissance

Abstract

Natural hazards and disaster reconnaissance investigations have provided valuable insights for research and practical applications, greatly improving our understanding of extreme events. Our improved understanding of extreme events has been facilitated by state-of-the-art instrumentation and mobile data collection technologies, enabling rapid acquisition of perishable data in post-disaster settings. The University of Washington’s RAPID Facility, supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), provides investigators with the hardware, software, and support services needed to collect, process, and assess perishable interdisciplinary data following extreme natural hazard events. This initiative offers comprehensive support to the natural hazards and disaster research community through training, educational initiatives, field deployment services, and by promoting public engagement with science and engineering. RAPID’s expert personnel and state-of-the-art instruments have executed reconnaissance missions on a global scale, generating transformative open-access datasets for the benefit of researchers and practitioners alike. Factors contributing to the success of reconnaissance efforts include establishing local contacts, fostering effective teamwork, and conducting pre-event training. This presentation will showcase compelling case studies from significant events such as Hurricane Michael (2018), the Paradise, California wildfires (2019), the Haines, Alaska Landslide (2020), Germany’s Ahr River floods (2021), and Hurricane Ian (2022), emphasizing the technologies used to collect and techniques used to process openly accessible natural disaster datasets.

Lecturer Bio

Dr. Michael Grilliot is a Senior Research Scientist in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Dept at the University of Washington. He manages the National Science Foundation-funded Field Reconnaissance “RAPID” Facility and holds a Ph.D. in Coastal Geomorphology from the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. His research focuses on a coastal sandy beach-dune systems, landslides, and perishable natural hazards and disaster data collection. Dr. Grilliot’stechnical skills focus on geodesy, precision measurements facilitated by lidar, structure-from-motion, uncrewed aerial systems, aeolian instrumentation, and geospatial analysis and mapping with GIS. As the RAPID Facility manager, he has participated in 22 post-disaster reconnaissance missions, including the 2019 Paradise, CA Wildfires; 2019-20 Puerto Rico Hurricane Dorian & Ponce Earthquakes; 2021 Haines, AK landslide; 2021 Grand Isle LA, Hurricane Ida; 2022 Boulder, CO wildfire; 2022 Ahr River Valley Flooding, Ahrweiler, Germany. He has helped train 100+ professors and numerous students on advanced field reconnaissance data collection techniques.