About: Mission & Vision

The RAPID Facility's mission is to enable transformative natural hazards research by providing scientists and engineers with advanced reconnaissance instrumentation, field expertise, and comprehensive support to collect perishable data from disasters. As the nation's only comprehensive natural hazards reconnaissance facility, we deploy cutting-edge instrumentation and train researchers to systematically document how extreme events affect communities, infrastructure, and natural systems.

Our work serves a broader vision: advancing fundamental understanding of natural hazards and disasters to create more resilient communities. By making high-quality reconnaissance data openly available to researchers, planners and decision-makers, and practitioners worldwide, we contribute to a future where communities can prepare for, withstand, and recover from natural disasters more effectively. Through systematic data collection and open science, we enable researchers to make breakthrough discoveries about how disasters initiate, evolve, and impact communities and the built and natural environments. These fundamental insights drive applied advances in disaster risk reduction—informing building codes that save lives, mitigation strategies that protect communities, and policy decisions that reduce economic losses.

As natural hazards science advances toward artificial intelligence (AI) approaches, our high-quality, systematically collected datasets provide the reliable foundation these cutting-edge analytical methods require. Our standardized data collection protocols and comprehensive documentation create the robust training datasets needed to develop predictive models that can forecast disaster impacts, identify at-risk places and communities, and optimize mitigation strategies. As a shared facility, we maintain research instruments for use by the entire research community, reducing equipment costs across institutions and agencies. This approach also minimizes the number of research teams operating in disaster-affected areas, as comprehensive datasets collected once can serve multiple research purposes.