NSF Award
2413246
This award funds a planning process for the creation of a new industry-university cooperative research center (IUCRC) on convective storm perils, focused on the needs of the insurance and finance sectors brought on by increasingly unpredictable weather patterns. This unpredictability has resulted in an increase in the number, intensity, and migration to new locations of perils like tornados, devastating hail, extreme precipitation, and flooding. Costs to the insurance and reinsurance industry is many tens of billions of dollars, annually, with the number of storms and costs escalating each year. In response to the looming crisis of the insurance sector insolvency, planning activities have been initiated to create an IUCRC to improve our understanding and better prediction of damaging convective storms. The proposed Center is anchored at two Sites: Northern Illinois University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The Center will target the needs of the insurance and finance sector as well as other parts of the value chain to devise a compelling set of Center research thrusts and projects for a proposed, industry-supported IUCRC to be called The Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Convective Storms (CIRCS). Planning activities will culminate in an in-person planning meeting attended by dozens of interested commercial entities with similar and/or overlapping needs. At the meeting the university faculty, committed to joining the Center, will provide a vision and mission for the Center, its value proposition, and examples of research projects the Center will undertake. If successful in attracting companies and other interested parties to join and pay a membership fee, all of which are pooled and used to fund high priority sector projects, a full Center proposal will be submitted to the National Science Foundation. If successful, the Center will focus on use-inspired, pre-competitive research to understand and provide tools and utilities to better understand and asses the risks of, and community/landscape/infrastructure vulnerability to, convective storm perils. Projects will involve advanced modeling and new observational capabilities designed to improve storm prediction. Broader impacts of the Center will include enhancing preparedness and response to convective storm-driven natural disasters to reduce their impact on loss of life and property, improving public safety and community resilience. It will also engage in public outreach and have strong student/workforce training elements in AI, machine learning, and big data analytics, improved early storm warnings, and the creation of more effective and accurate means of forecasting and assessing the risks of these dangerous storms and the damage they cause. <br/><br/>If realized, the IUCRC Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Convective Storms (CIRCS) will employ interdisciplinary faculty and sophisticated high performance computing analytical and modeling methods, machine learning, satellite information and AI to develop more accurate forecasts for convective storm predication. It will be populated by teams of faculty from two institutions (Northern Illinois University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison) with faculty that span the disciplines of meteorology, computer science, statistics, and engineering. It will develop improved and more efficient and effective models and algorithms to improve storm prediction as well as pioneer novel use of satellite remote sensing in addition to new methodologies for enable dynamical downscaling to the local scale for improving and extending to longer time scale estimates of storm arrival, damage, and economic loss. Results can be used by the insurance and actuarial sectors to improve convective storm risk assessment to make better decisions as well as influence public policy for adaption to climate change. Impacts of the work will be valuable to increasing stability and solvency of the insurance sector and provide valuable insights that can also be used in the agriculture and installed infrastructure sectors.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
