SAFRR AND Physics-Based Scenarios: The Power of Scientifically Credible Stories

Abstract:

USGS’s SAFRR (Science Application for Risk Reduction) Project and its predecessor, the Multi Hazards Demonstration Project, uses the latest earth science to develop scenarios so that communities can improve disaster resilience. SAFRR has created detailed physics-based natural-disaster scenarios of a M7.8 San Andreas earthquake in southern California (ShakeOut), atmospheric-river storms rivaling the Great California Flood of 1862 (ARkStorm), a Tohoku-sized earthquake and tsunami in the eastern Aleutians (SAFRR Tsunami), and now a M7.05 quake on the Hayward Fault in the San Francisco Bay area (HayWired), as novel ways of providing science for decision making. Each scenario is scientifically plausible, deterministic, and large enough to demand attention but not too large to be believable. The scenarios address interacting hazards, requiring involvement of multiple science disciplines and user communities. The scenarios routinely expose hitherto unknown or ignored vulnerabilities, most often in cascading effects missed when impacts are considered in isolation. They take advantage of story telling to provide decision makers with clear explanations and justifications for mitigation and preparedness actions, and have been used for national-to-local disaster response exercises and planning. Effectiveness is further leveraged by downscaling the scenarios to local levels. For example, although the ARkStorm scenario describes state-scale events and has been used that way by NASA and the Navy, SAFRR also partnered with FEMA to focus on two local areas, Ventura County in the coastal plain and the mountain setting of Lake Tahoe with downstream impacts in Reno, Sparks and Carson City. Downscaling and focused analyses increased usefulness to user communities, drawing new participants into the study. SAFRR scenarios have also motivated new research to answer questions uncovered by stakeholders, closing the circle of co-evolving disaster-science and disaster-response improvements.