The health and security of our nation’s bridges, dams, roads, and powerlines are critical to our everyday lives. Proper assessment of this critical infrastructure is often retrospective in response to known issues, rather than proactive in nature. The Environmental Geophysics group is developing novel sensing and computing approaches to enable the creation of “smart infrastructure” capable of providing autonomous information about condition assessment and aiding in rapid emergency response and management. Current examples include characterization of levee structural integrity for seismic hazard assessment; integrated monitoring and modelling of hydrological processes for landslide early warning; monitoring and prediction of subsurface energy borehole integrity for geothermal and subsurface natural gas storage; and a novel distributed sensing approach for offshore wind energy development and impacts on marine mammal activities, such as humpback whales.
Key Projects
- Next Generation Multi-Hazard Levee Risk Assessment
- Borehole integrity monitoring
- Underground natural gas storage and borehole monitoring
- Offshore wind infrastructure and marine mammal monitoring