My third area of research focuses on modeling the impact of hurricanes on power systems and examining how global climate change may influence hurricane frequency, intensity and track. A reliable supply of electric power is vital to the economy and security of the U.S. Sustained outages can impede restoration efforts after natural disasters, leading to disruption of the social fabric of an area. As the failure of electric power systems in recent events such as Hurricanes Katrina (2005) and Isabel (2003) have shown, current systems are often unable to withstand the stresses placed on them by natural hazards.  I am working with Dr. Seth Guikema and collaborators to develop new models of both short-term and long-term power outage risks associated with hurricanes.  We have had contracts with a major Gulf Coast utility company for the last several years to develop models to predict the number of outages and customers without power due to hurricanes.  This work has lead to a number of conference presentations and three journal articles that describe the Generalized Linear Models and Generalized Additive Models that we developed for predicting the number of power outages and customers without power prior to hurricane landfall (Reliability Engineering & System Safety 2009; IEEE Trans. on Power Systems;  Risk Analysis). 

We (Drs. Guikema, Quiring, and Irish) recently received three years of funding from the Department of Energy (DOE) to quantify the impact of climate change on hurricane wind and surge risk to power systems.  We will be using a probabilistic multi-scale approach for assessing the long-term reliability of regional electric power systems in hurricane-prone areas that accounts for time-varying factors such as the influence of global climate change on sea surface temperatures on hurricane formation location, strength, and track.  Incorporating these time-varying effects will yield a better understanding of the long-term hurricane wind and surge risk to power systems. 

• Co-Principal Investigator: Department of Energy, Collaborative Proposal: Climate-Induced Changes in Hurricane Winds, Surge, and Risk to Electric Power Systems (09/01/08–08/31/11; $450,000); with S. Guikema (PI) and J. Irish (PI) (Grant No. DE-FG02-08ER64644).

• Han, S.R., Guikema, S. D., Quiring, S. M., Lee, K. H., Rosowsky, D. V., and R.A. Davidson (2009) Estimating the spatial distribution of power outages during hurricanes in the Gulf coast region. Reliability Engineering & System Safety, 94: 199-210.

• Han, S. R., Guikema, S., Quiring, S., Davidson, R., Lee, K. H., Rosowsky, D. (2006) Estimating power outage risk during hurricanes in the Gulf Coast region.  Contributed paper to be presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Risk Analysis, Baltimore, MD, December

• Han, S.R., Guikema, S. D., Quiring, S. M. (submitted) Improving the predictive accuracy of hurricane power outage forecasts using Generalized Additive Models. Risk Analysis.

• Nateghi, R., Quiring, S., and S. D. Guikema (2008) Establishing the Link Between Climate Change, Climate Variability and Hurricane Hazard in the U.S.. In JSM Proceedings, Physical and Engineering Sciences Section. Alexandria, VA: American Statistical Association.
  

• Han, S.R., Guikema, S. D., Quiring, S. M., Lee, K. H., Rosowsky, D. V., and R.A. Davidson (under revision) Supporting pre-hurricane planning through forecasts of customer loss of power and power system damage. IEEE Trans. on Power Systems.