CAREER: APEX-STORM: Advancing the Preparedness to EXtreme Winter Storms Through Outage and Restoration Model

The objective of this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project is to support research on understanding snow and icing accretion on power and transportation infrastructures to improve forecasting of power outage and restoration during winter storms. The research intends to enable electric utilities to take proactive and appropriate actions to reduce disruption and its impact. Built upon an ongoing partnership with four major electric utilities serving more than 20 million customers, the project aims to yield substantial benefits to government agencies, electric utilities, and residents by enhancing their preparedness and response to winter storms. Additionally, this project contributes to classroom teaching and professional development as well as informing decision-making on severe weather. Every year, snow and ice storms knock out power to millions of people in the Northeastern United States. Loss of power in frigid conditions carries significant health and safety risks. This project represents one of the first attempts at developing a new correction model for snowfall density estimates based on weather forecast and field observation. A novel icing accretion model will drive the prediction of failure of power lines and travel speed on roads. With more than 80% distribution network being overhead, the results of this project intend to offer useful insights into impact of severe weather on critical infrastructures and measures for improving community resilience. The project is jointly funded by Humans, Disasters, and the Built Environment Program and Physical and Dynamic Meteorology Program. 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.