Diego Cerrai Receives NSF CAREER Award for Power Outage and Restoration Modeling

A winter scene shows a group of five people standing outside on a snow-covered field, observing or working with scientific weather equipment. The group is dressed in winter clothing, including coats and hats. One person is pointing toward a piece of equipment in the center of the image. To the right, a large white trailer with the NASA logo and other research decals is parked on the snow. Several tall weather instruments and sensors are installed around the area, and leafless trees form a wooded backdrop under a cloudy sky. A residential house is visible in the distance on the left side of the image.Dr. Diego Cerrai, a civil and environmental engineering professor, stands smiling in front of a large piece of scientific equipment mounted on a trailer. The equipment appears to be a radar or weather sensor with a white, angular dish pointed upward. The background shows a partly cloudy sky and an open landscape with grassy fields and trees.

The School of Civil and Environmental Engineering proudly announces that Dr. Diego Cerrai, Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Interim Director of the Eversource Energy Center (EEC), has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award in support of his research into storm impact modeling and infrastructure resilience.

Cerrai’s work focuses on understanding snow and ice accretion on power infrastructure, which is a key contributor to outages during winter storms. His team has been collaborating with NASA for the past four years, collecting detailed data on falling snow, including its density and the number of particles in a given volume. These observations are essential for refining weather models and building more accurate outage prediction tools.

“The first step is to fix those inconsistencies and biases and make sure that the quantities that the weather model predict match the observation we collect,” Cerrai explains.

The UConn Outage Prediction Model (OPM), already in use by Eversource Energy, Dominion Energy, Avangrid, and Exelon, helps utility companies plan ahead of severe weather. With support from the NSF CAREER Award, Cerrai will improve the model’s accuracy and expand its application to more regions.

Cerrai is also developing a restoration model to estimate how long power outages will last. This model factors in snow density, outage forecasts, and utility company priorities while addressing one major oversight in current restoration tools: road conditions.

“Right now, we use the speed limit to predict how fast the crews move,” Cerrai says. “But in winter, you can have blocked roads and snow on the roads. So, for accurate forecasts, it is absolutely necessary to model the road conditions.”

A long-term goal of this work is to reduce disparities in restoration timelines between rural and urban communities by rethinking how restoration is prioritized.

In addition to the technical advancements, the grant also supports a training course for utility decision-makers and emergency response planners, ensuring they have access to, and know how to apply, the most up-to-date modeling tools.

Cerrai’s NSF CAREER project was recently highlighted by NASA’s Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) outreach team, which is using the story to help inspire future scientists to explore precipitation research. Cerrai is also sharing the news with the National Academy of Engineering’s Frontiers of Engineering (FOE) network, where he is a 2022 alum.

Read Dr. Cerrai’s welcome message as EEC interim director.