Center for Land Surface Hazards (CLaSH) Catalyst Project
Funded by the NSF Centers for Innovation and Community Engagement in Solid Earth Hazards – Award #2224871
The Center for Land Surface Hazards (CLaSH) Catalyst confronts the challenge of understanding interconnections between hazards that can greatly magnify their effects – such as earthquakes that trigger landsliding, river alluviation, damming and later flooding, or storms that follow wildfire and trigger debris flows and floods. These cascading hazards – sequences of events in which one geohazard triggers another, resulting in cumulative impacts that are more severe than the sum of the individual events – are globally pervasive and have a widespread impact on communities and society. The pace and impact of these cascades are rapidly increasing in the face of global change and population growth, yet most research focuses on singular hazards, rather than the connections between them. Coordinated science efforts are urgently needed to understand how land surface processes work in tandem and in a changing world.
In 2022, a team of 4 PIs, 7 early career scientists from institutions across the US, along with and 8 partner organizations, came together to submit a Track 1: Center Catalyst proposal to the new NSF Centers for Innovation and Community Engagement in the Solid Earth Sciences. These two-year awards address topics that focus on the fundamental processes that create solid Earth geohazards. Funded in Sept 2022, the CLaSH Catalyst proposal outlined center development activities, including goal setting, strategic planning and community building, as well as developing and piloting center-scale activities that generate new knowledge with a broad range of impacts.
The CLaSH vision is based on the premise that hazard research and education can be transformed by coordinated modeling and data acquisition to address the couplings of surface and solid Earth processes. We engaged in numerous research, broader impact activities, and center development activities over the two-year duration of the award. Pilot activities during 2023 and early 2024 included:
- a 2-part Modeling Expo that explored cutting-edge developments in computational efforts to understand land surface hazard components and their coupling
- education efforts to design and implement inclusive practices for field training through a hosted graduate short course that focused on technical training and a team-oriented hazard response
- in-depth research efforts to catalyze the paradigm of cascading hazards from which a review article was written and is in review at the journal Science
- numerous community activities including several workshops, AGU town halls and sessions, and strategic planning sessions
- a multi-disciplinary hazards response activity for the 2023 Hurricane Hilary with project partners from a wide range of organizations, funded separately through NSF RAPID
- team engagement and leadership trainings
Through this work, the team assessed which activities garnered interest and engagement in order to inform a proposed Center strategy. They also worked to ensure that activities promoted a diverse community of geoscientists because forging discoveries and reducing the risk associated with land surface hazards demands many voices, particularly those from vulnerable populations. The results of these efforts were used to define the Center vision and build a community, culminating in a Track 2 Center proposal or funding a fully-fledged 5-year Center submitted in March 2024. Future funding decisions are expected later this year or in early 2025.










