Bricks & Bungees, Triggers & Shadows, or What's New in Earthquake Risk

Ross S. Stein

U. S. Geological Survey

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Please find the presentation attached.

 

Using a brick and bungee demonstration to explore and explain the principles of earthquake occurrence and earthquake interaction, Ross Stein demonstrated how earth scientists are making progress in the very difficult problem of earthquake forecasting by solving the easy parts first. He then moved to a series of computer animations that extend the demo into three dimensions, showing how the concept of earthquake stress triggering is being applied to quake sequences in California, Japan, Sumatra, and Turkey.

 

 

Ross Stein is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and the Geological Society of America, was Editor of the Journal of Geophysical Research during 1986-1989, and chaired AGU’s Board of Journal Editors in 2004-2006. During 1993-2003, the Science Citation Index reported that Stein was the second most-cited author in earthquake science. Dr. Stein received the Eugene M. Shoemaker Distinguished Achievement Award of the USGS in 2000, the Excellence in Outreach Award of the Southern California Earthquake Center in 1999, and the Outstanding Contributions and Cooperation in Geoscience Award from NOAA in 1991. He was keynote speaker at the Smithsonian Institution for the Presidential Awards for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching in 2005, and gave the Frontiers of Geophysics Lecture of the AGU in 2001. He has appeared in a number of documentary films and the 2004 IMAX movie ‘Forces of Nature,’ which he helped to write and animate.

 

Advances in Flood Hazard Forecasting: Using the International Community to Accelerate Innovation

Karel Heynert

Head of Hydrodynamics and Real-Time Systems Group, Deltares

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

Please find the presentation attached.

 

One obstacle to flood hazard forecasting in developing countries is data-poor environment. In such an environment, flood early warning systems (FEWS) provide national/regional authorities with the capability to begin a flood hazard forecasting program with limited data and to expand the forecasting program as data becomes available. 

 

The presentation will discuss the successful open systems approach and the future ambitions of Deltares in the field of flood hazard forecasting. It will address the challenges of data-poor environments and demonstrate how Delft-FEWS, Deltares' open-shell forecasting framework, enables productive inter-agency cooperation and facilitates the introduction of new state-of-the-art methods from the research field into the operational arena. The system has been adopted as the national flood forecasting system in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Taiwan and the United States. On a regional scale, Delft-FEWS is used operationally in Pakistan, Italy, Georgia and by the Mekong River Commission.

 

 

Karel Heynert is a hydrologist with over 20 years of international experience in water management, flood forecasting and flood risk management. Currently he heads the Hydrodynamics and Real-Time Systems Group within Deltares (formerly called Delft Hydraulics). Based in The Netherlands, Deltares provides specialist consultancy services and conducts applied research in the field of marine and coastal systems, inland and ground water systems, and geo-technics. Over the past 7 years Karel Heynert has been leading Deltares’ activities in real-time flood risk forecasting, including the implementation of national flood forecasting systems in the United States and the United Kingdom.

 

Numerical Methods and Computational Techniques Development and Application in the Decision-Making Process in Front of the New and Global Environmental Challenges

Pere-Andreu Ubach de Fuentes

International Centre for Numerical Methods in Engineering (CIMNE), Deputy Director

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

(Presentation in DVD format to be distributed to attendees)

 

The purpose of this presentation is to share with the audience the active CAPRA’s initiative experience, elaborated by CIMNE for the World Bank and related to enhancement of disaster risk understanding in the Central American region, as a starting point to illustrate the Numerical Methods and Computational Techniques development and application for the decision-making process in front of the new global environmental challenges.
 
Given its clear international professional vocation and strategic scope, and through its 23 knowledge-sharing, development and Numerical Methods Application and Computational Techniques application classrooms, the CIMNE carries out numerous research and development activities and participates in a large number of technology transfer projects in cooperation with over one hundred and fifty enterprises and organisations from different countries. Some of them will be presented to the attendees, focusing on those dealing with civil and environmental engineering and energy sectors’ sustainable duties.

 

 

Mr. Pere-Andreu Ubach de Fuentes is a Roads, Channels and Ports Engineer, as well as a Master of Science in Construction Management by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is now CIMNE’s Deputy Director, having previously worked in the organization as an R&D Project Strategies Consultant, closely collaborating with Dr. Eugenio Oñate, director, as his assistant. Having participated in many public and private financed R&D projects, and contributed to many other international congresses, he is author of one published book. More recently he has coordinated the new CIMNE’s dependencies construction in the Catalonia’s Polytechnic University Mediterranean Technology Park. 

 

Community-Based Landslide Risk Reduction: Scaling Up in the Caribbean

Malcolm Anderson and Liz Holcombe

MoSSaiC; University of Bristol, UK

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

(Please find the presentation attached)

MoSSaiC is a methodology to reduce landslide risk affecting communities and infrastructure in developing countries.

Launched in 2004, MoSSaiC addresses landslide risk at the community scale in the most vulnerable communities. Their work with community groups and government agencies delivers low cost landslide risk reduction measures on the ground. The knowledge of community members is vital in synthesizing the highly-localised slope processes that cause landslides. MoSSaiC combines this local knowledge with a community mapping methodology and with the use of their industry-standard slope stability software (CHASMTM). Where appropriate they can then design a drainage plan to manage surface water in the community and reduce the landslide risk. This approach has been developed in Saint Lucia, West Indies, where on-the-ground drainage construction has been completed in 6 communities by community contractors. The methodology has been formally endorsed by the Government of Saint Lucia which has committed Government Revenue funds to MoSSaiC in the Budget years 2005/06, 2006/07 and 2008/09.

Having outlined the proof of concept, we will look at issues of developing an appropriate franchise for the scaling up of the approach in a regional context, together with the appropriate supporting resources. Finally, we will discuss, and seek views on, issues of how best to capture the benefits of this preventative approach to landslide risk reduction, and appropriate ways of relating these to the real costs involved.

Background information on MoSSaiC is available at www.mossaic.org

The World Bank and the OpenGeospatial Web

Chris Holmes

OpenGeo, President

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

(Please find the presentation attached)

 

The past few years have seen an explosion in the awareness of geospatial information, with Google Maps and Google Earth making the previously specialized domain of GIS available to everyone.  Can we see an equivalent explosion in access to the data that these systems visualize? Utilizing the principles of open source, Web 2.0 and 'Architectures of Participation', Chris Holmes believes that through the creation of the Open Geospatial Web the answer to this question is yes.

 

Earthquake Early Warning Systems: State of the Art and Future Perspectives

Paolo Gasparini and Gaetano Manfredi

University of Napoli "Federico II"

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

(Please find the presentation attached)

 

While the prediction of earthquakes is still controversial, current technology allows for prompt identification of the onset of potentially dangerous seismic events seconds before its hits an urban area. Paolo Gasparini and Gaetano Manfredi will present early warning system technologies in use in Japan, Italy, Ukraine and Romania to protect high speed trains, metro lines and nuclear power plants. The technology uses the small time difference on the arrival time between the fast travelling low amplitude compressional (P) waves and the high energy destructive waves (shear and superficial waves). Though warnings are issued only a fraction of second before a potentially destructive event, this is often enough to protect sensitive infrastructures. These early warning systems also allow for the generation of fast and reliable information on ground motions at different sites, allowing the rapid production of damage maps useful for emergency and rescuing action

 

 

Paolo Gasparini Professor of Geophysics at the University of Napoli "Federico II" and President of the AMRA Scarl a no-profit consortium owned by five universities and three national research agencies. AMRA Scarl is managing the only earthquake early warning system in Italy. Prof. Gasparini is member of the Executive Committee of the SAFER Project, a European Community funded project on Earthquake Early Warning. He is Scientific Advisor for the Environment of the European Commissioner of Research. He has contributed to the Mt. Vesuvius volcano emergency Plan of the Italian Civil Defense. His main expertise is on the seismological and real time risk reduction aspects of earthquake early warnings.

Gaetano Manfredi Professor of Structural Engineering at the University of Napoli "Federico II" and member of the AMRA Scarl Executive Committee. He is Director of RELUIS, a no-profit consortium of Earthquake Engineering Laboratories, a reference institution for the Italian Civil Defence. His main expertise is on the implementation of automatic engineering application and on the decisional aspects of the earthquake early warning systems.
Prof. Gasparini and Manfredi are co-editors, with Prof. Jochen Zschau, of a book titled: "Earthquake Early Warning Systems" published by Springer, Heidelberg, in 2007.