CITRIS Research Exchange: Michele Barbato on Hazard-resistant Infrastructure

Talk Title: “Climate Change Effects on Hurricane Risk for Single-Family Houses in the United States”

Speaker: Michele Barbato, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UC Davis

Abstract: Hurricanes are among the most costly natural hazards affecting communities worldwide, and they involve different hazard sources (i.e., wind, windborne debris, flood and rain). Climate change is expected to increase the intensity of future hurricanes. This presentation will illustrate a novel probabilistic Performance-Based Hurricane Engineering (PBHE) framework that disaggregates the risk assessment analysis into independent elementary components and innovatively accounts for concurrent, interacting and cascading hazards. The PBHE framework is extended to account for hazard (climate change) and vulnerability (structural aging) non-stationarity. Using a recently developed wind speed projection model and the climate projections in the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, the loss analysis for a benchmark low-rise single-family house over a 50-year service life is performed. For this application example, the combined effects of climate change and structural aging can almost double the expected total losses during a 50-year service life when compared to the stationary conditions.

Speaker Bio: Michele Barbato is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Davis. He is co-director of the UC Davis Climate Adaptation Research Center and director of the CITRIS Climate research initiative. He is a licensed professional engineer (PE) in Louisiana and in Italy. Barbato’s research aims to develop safer, economic and more rational design procedures for sustainable infrastructures and resilient communities. He is the author of more than two hundred technical publications. He received the 2020 ASCE Sacramento Section Fredrick Panhost Structural Engineer Award, the 2020 Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize, and many additional research, teaching and service awards. He was elected a Structural Engineering Institute fellow and Engineering Mechanics Institute fellow by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) in 2019 and an ASCE fellow in 2021.

About the Series: CITRIS Research Exchange delivers fresh perspectives on information technology and society from distinguished academic, industry and civic leaders. Free and open to the public, these seminars feature leading voices on societal-scale research issues. Presentations take place on Wednesdays from noon to 1 p.m. PT.