Omar Nofal

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Assistant Professor at Florida International University

Modeling and improving community resilience to natural hazards has gained substantial interest over the past two decades, in part, due to the increased level of coupled risk resulting from climate change and urbanization. Evidence suggests that climate change increases both the frequency and intensity of climatic hazards, such as hurricanes, tornad...

This final report provides an overview of the project activities. This includes forming an advisory committee and assessing the performance of SGDs according to standards such as ASTM E331, ASTM E547, AAMA/WDMA/WDMA/CSA101/I.S.2/A440, North American Fenestration Standard/Specification for windows, doors, and skylights (NAFS), TAS 202, and the FBC u...

Compound threats, in which cyberattacks are targeted in the aftermath of a natural hazard, pose an important emerging threat for critical infrastructure. In this paper, we analyze the system design implications of compound threats for power grid SCADA systems for the first time. We introduce a novel compound threat model and develop a tool for anal...

This paper presents a building-level post-hazard functionality model for communities exposed to flood hazards including the interdependencies between the population, buildings, and infrastructure. An existing portfolio of building archetypes is used to model the post-hazard physical flood functionality of different building typologies within the co...

Modeling community resilience to flood hazards has gained substantial interest over the past two decades due to the increased risk from climate change and urbanization. Climate change increases both the frequency and intensity of some natural hazards, which is further exacerbated by urbanization. Post-hazard functionality assessment of buildings an...

Hurricane-induced hazards can result in significant damage to the built environment cascading into major impacts to the households, social institutions, and local economy. Although quantifying physical impacts of hurricane-induced hazards is essential for risk analysis, it is necessary but not sufficient for community resilience planning. While the...

Wind hazards often result in significant damage to the built environment cascading into impacts on the socio-economic systems within a community. The increasing frequency and intensity of hurricane hazards highlight the importance of developing high-resolution wind hazard models to better predict the consequences. Although previous studies have inv...

Coastal communities can be exposed to significant damage from hurricane-induced hazards including storm wind, surge, wave, and inundation effects. The cascading impacts of these hazards stem from the collective damage incurred to the buildings and infrastructure systems within the community. In addition, the dependencies between infrastructure syst...

Modeling community resilience to natural hazards has gained substantial interest over the past decades due to the increased frequency and intensity resulting from climate change and urbanization. However, current research still lacks a comprehensive post-hazard functionality model that encompasses all the community components including households,...

Every year, floods cause substantial economic losses worldwide with devastating impacts on buildings and physical infrastructures throughout communities. Techniques are available to mitigate flood damage and subsequent losses, but the ability to weigh such strategies with respect to their benefits from a community resilience perspective is limited...

Floods account for the highest annual average losses from natural hazards across the United States, and the occurrence of repeat flood inundation events in United States communities is increasing. Distinguishing damages caused by distinct flood events in a community that has experienced repeated flooding is difficult, and best practices for repeat...

Modern construction of high-rise and tall buildings depends on coupled shear walls system to resist the lateral loads induced by wind and earthquake hazards. The lateral behavior of this system depends on the structural behavior of its components including coupling beams and shear walls. Although many research studies in the literature investigated...

The growing number of flood disasters worldwide and the subsequent catastrophic consequences of these events have revealed the flood vulnerability of communities. Flood impact predictions are essential for better flood risk management which can result in an improvement of flood preparedness for vulnerable communities. Early flood warnings can provi...

Hurricanes are devastating natural hazards that often cause damage to the built environment as a result of their loadings which include storm surge, waves, and wind, often in combination. Modeling these hazards individually and their effects on buildings is a complex process in that each loading component within the hazard behaves differently affec...

Hurricanes or typhoons are multi-hazard events that usually result in strong winds, storm surge, waves, and debris flow. A community-level multi-hazard hurricane risk analysis approach is proposed herein to account for the combined impacts of hazards driven by hurricanes including surge, wave, and wind. A tightly coupled ADCIRC and SWAN model is us...

Communities are changing the way they manage flood risk as a result of climate change which increases both the flood hazard intensity and frequency and therefore results in more flood exposure for the built environment. Quantifying the feasibility of policy changes requires a standardized approach that can allow a risk-informed decision. The curren...

Hurricanes are devastating natural hazards that often cause damage to coastal and in-land communities as a result of their loadings which include storm surge, waves, wind, and rainfall and riverine flooding, often in combination. Modeling these hazards individually and their effects on buildings is a complex process in that each loading component w...

Flooding is a devastating natural hazard whose consequences include loss of life, and damage to community in-frastructure, with even further impacts resulting from interdependencies of physical and non-physical systems. Flood risk prediction is a critical component of a comprehensive risk-informed decision framework and is used in combination with...

Flood risk mitigation is paramount to decreasing the exposure of vulnerable communities to flooding events and provides a mechanism for communities to plan for future events. The majority of flood mitigation studies have focused on community-level mitigation rather than building-level mitigation measures. In this study, the impact of applying build...

This document dictionary provides a summary of the files archived on DesginSafe-CI. The table below provides a summary of each file in the archive, with the file name, descriptive tags, and a description of the file.

There are different methods to quantify the amount of uncertainties in the analysis of structures and their design procedures. The efficiency and the suitability of each method depend on the type of analysis and the load scenario that will be used for this analysis. In this paper, different uncertainty propagation meth-ods are used to quantify the...

There are different methods to quantify the amount of uncertainties in the analysis of structures and their design procedures. The efficiency and the suitability of each method depend on the type of analysis and the load scenario that will be used for this analysis. In this paper, different uncertainty propagation meth-ods are used to quantify the...

Current flood vulnerability analyses rely on deterministic methods (e.g., stage–damage functions) to quantify resulting damage and losses to the built environment. While such approaches have been used extensively by communities, they do not enable the propagation of uncertainty into a risk- or resilience-informed decision process. In this paper, a...

This research investigates the effect of coupling beam parameters on the nonlinear behavior of the coupled shear walls system. The full behavior of a 10-story coupled shear wall system was modeled using a series of finite element analyses. The analysis comprised of testing several coupling beam parameters to capture the effect of each parameter on...

Propagating uncertainties in flood damage models is a critical step towards a risk-informed decision methodology that is based on quantitative assessment. Flood-related data scarcity and the use of deterministic models present challenges when seeking to include uncertainties in flood damage modeling. In this paper, a single-variable and multi-varia...

Flood events are one of the most common natural disasters in the United States and can disrupt businesses; strain the financial resources of agencies that respond; and often leave households dislocated for days, months, or permanently. Community resilience planning requires an assessment of the damage and loss caused by a hazard followed by recover...

Floods can be devastating to communities and result in fatalities and injuries, negatively impacting the economy, and quality of life. This paper presents a review of community resilience research with a focus on flood hazard including recent advances in flood risk quantification methods and trends to integrate socio-economic factors. The focus of...

Reinforced concrete coupled shear walls (CSWs) is considered one of the most commonly used lateral load resisting system which enhances the seismic behavior of the overall structure. The coupling enables two or more walls to act as one system with a certain level of efficiency in resisting lateral loads depending on the degree of coupling provided...