Measuring User Satisfaction for the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure Consortium

The User Forum is a Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI)-wide group focused on providing the NHERI Council with independent advice on community user satisfaction, priorities, and needs relating to the use and capabilities of NHERI. The User Forum has representation across NHERI activities, including representatives working directly with the Network Coordination Office (NCO), Education and Community Outreach (ECO), Facilities Scheduling, and Technology Transfer efforts. The User forum also provides feedback on the NHERI Science Plan. As the community voice within the governance of NHERI, the User Forum is composed of members nominated and elected by the NHERI community for a specified term of 1–2 years. User Forum membership spans academia and industry, the full breadth of civil engineering and social science disciplines, and widespread hazard expertise including earthquakes, windstorms, and water events. One of the primary responsibilities of the User Forum is to conduct an annual community user satisfaction survey for NHERI users, and publish a subsequent Annual Community Report. Measuring user satisfaction and providing this feedback to the NHERI Council is critical to supporting the long-term sustainability of NHERI and its mission as a multidisciplinary and multi-hazard network. In this paper, the role and key activities of the User Forum are described, including User Forum member election procedures, User Forum member representation and roles across NHERI activities, and the processes for measuring and reporting user satisfaction. This paper shares the user satisfaction survey distributed to NHERI users, and discusses the challenges to measuring community user satisfaction based on the definition of user. Finally, this paper discusses the evolving approaches of measuring user satisfaction using other methods, including engaging with the twelve NHERI research infrastructures

Longshore currents near Cape Hatteras, NC

As part of a beach erosion field experiment conducted at Cape Hatteras, NC in February 2010, this study focuses on quantifying longshore currents, which are the basic mechanism that drives longshore sediment transport. Using video imagery, the longshore currents in view of a video camera are estimated with the Optical Current Meter technique and the nearshore morphology is estimated by analyzing breaking wave patterns in standard deviation images. During a Nor‟easter storm event on February 12 and 13, 2010, the video longshore currents are compared to in situ data and it is found that the currents are most affected by the angle of incidence of incoming waves, increasing in magnitude as the angle becomes more oblique due to a larger component of radiation stress forcing in the longshore direction. The magnitude of the radiation stress forcing, which is at least an order of magnitude larger than the surface wind stress, increases as wave height increases or tide level decreases, which causes more wave breaking to occur. The normalized standard deviation images show wave breaking occurring at an inshore and offshore location, corresponding closely to the locations of an inner and outer bar indicated in survey data. Using two profiles from the survey data, one profile that intersects a trough and one that intersects a terrace, the video currents are also compared to currents simulated in one-dimension using the circulation module, SHORECIRC, and the wave module, REF/DIF-S, as part of the NearCoM system. Although the simulated currents greatly underpredict the video currents when the flow is only driven by radiation stresses, a mean water level difference between the two profiles creates a longshore pressure gradient. Superimposing a pressure gradient forcing term into the longshore momentum balance that assumes an equilibrium state of the flow, the magnitude of the simulated currents are much larger than the magnitude of the video estimated currents. Using analytical solutions of simplified forms of the mass and momentum equations to determine the effects of accelerations on the flow, it is seen that the acceleration term greatly affects the flow due to the relatively large mean water level difference that acts over a relatively short distance. Therefore, the pressure gradient forcing term is modified to include the effects of accelerations. By including the two-dimensional effects of the acceleration in the one-dimensional model through the modified pressure gradient, the quasi two-dimensional model simulated currents are very similar to the video estimated currents, indicating that the currents observed in the video may be pressure gradient driven.MSCommittee Chair: Haas, Kevin; Committee Member: Fritz, Hermann; Committee Member: Work, Pau