Budget Justification
 
The work will be performed at, CEAE, University of Colorado, Boulder. Rajagopalan Balaji will work on evaluating the hurricane track simulation models and developing/modifying the Track Segment Model to simulate tracks, winds, precipitation and flooding. Ross Corotis will work on developing methods for load combination and structural failure models. Dan Frangopol will be involved in the development of structural reliability model. For their respective activities, Corotis and Frangopol are budgeted for 3/4th month and, Balaji for one month, of their summer salary with fringe benefits charged in accordance with university policy. Two graduate students are budgeted in the proposal – one of them to work with Balaji on comparing and developing the hurricane model, integrating it with load estimation and structural failure models; and the other with Frangopol and Corotis on the structural aspects of the proposal – i.e. developing structural failure models and structural reliability estimation tool. The students will be jointly supervised. We have budgeted $3000 for GIS software licensing and $3000 to purchase a computer for the students that will be working on this project. Approximately $2000 is budgeted each year for travel to one professional conference to present the results of the research, and one trip to the east coat for research meetings with FEMA members of the HAZUS initiative.  The salaries are inflated at 4.4% and the tuition at 3.4% per year as per university policy.