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Publication: "Addressing administrative units in international tsunami early warning systems: shortcomings in international geocode standards"

"Addressing administrative units in international tsunami early warning systems: shortcomings in international geocode standards", International Journal of Digital Earth, Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/17538947.2011.584574

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a938525913~frm=titlelink

Abstract:

Administrative units reflect the territorial hierarchies established within all countries of the world. The units are addressable with geocodes that provide a bijective mapping between territories and unique identification codes. Early warning systems for natural or man-made hazards often map affected or threatened areas to administrative units to establish a spatial reference that is comprehensible to all parts of the population. Addressing these territories in an international context has several requirements, such as worldwide coverage, completeness and topicality, which must be met by geocode standards. In this paper, the practicability and suitability of international geocode standards are examined in the context of the requirements of large-scale early warning systems. This paper exposes the insufficiencies and limitations of existing geocode standards International Organization for Standardization (ISO)-3166, Second Administrative Level Boundaries data set project (SALB) and Nomenclature of the Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) and emphasises the suitability of the non-official hierarchical administrative subdivision codes (HASC). The analysis is framed in the context of addressing affected areas for an Indian Ocean tsunami early warning system. This system was developed within the Distant Early Warning Systems project according to the requirements of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Intergovernmental Oceanic Commission for Regional Tsunami Watch Providers (RTWPs).
New book publication "Geoinformatics" with a reference to DEWS

The new book Geoinformatics: Cyberinfrastructure for the Solid Earth Sciences will be published on 30th June. On page 329 the two projects DEWS and GITEWS are referenced in the context of the emergence of Sensor Web Eneablement (SWE) and conceptual models of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). This section is part of chapter 21 "Geoinformatics developments in Germany" which was written by Jens Klump, Joachim Wächter*, Peter Löwe*, Ralf Bill and Matthias Lendholt*.

* member of DEWS team

Cover of Geoinformatics

Press Conference at EGU General Assembly 2011

As with previous years, selected sessions along with all press conferences (see the EGU General Assembly 2011 Official Blog and EGU Media Portal) have been live-streamed and recorded during the General Assembly 2011 and are also available on demand after the conference.

One of the notably press conferences took place on Thursday, April 7, 2011, with participation of two partners active in DEWS: Stefano Tinti and Joachim Wächter. The press conference "PC10 - Press Conference 10 Tsunami impact and Tsunami Early Warning Systems" (Stefano Tinti, Jörn Lauterjung, Joachim Wächter, Masahiro Yamamoto, Bruce Malamud) is available online at http://www.cntv.at/EGU2011/index.php?modid=18&a=show&pid=142.

Other interesting sessions are:

"US5 The 11 March 2011 Tohoku (Sendai) Earthquake and Tsunami" available at http://www.cntv.at/EGU2011/index.php?modid=18&a=show&pid=156, and

"PC9 - Press Conference 9 The 22 February 2011 Christchurch Earthquake" available at http://www.cntv.at/EGU2011/index.php?modid=18&a=show&pid=141

"The 2010 Haiti and Chile eartquakes and tsunami - What made the difference?" available at http://www.cntv.at/EGU2010/index.php?modid=18&a=show&pid=66 recorded last year at the EGU General Assembly 2010

Story of the month at CORDIS - EU creates tsunami early warning system

EU-funded researchers have helped develop an early warning system that will protect vulnerable communities from tsunamis and avoid future terrible losses of life such as that suffered in Indonesia and Sri Lanka in December 2004, when an estimated 230,000 people were killed. EU support for the research came from the DEWS ('Distant early warning system') project, which received just over EUR 4 million from the 'Information society technologies' (IST) Thematic area of the EU's Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) to develop an advanced interoperable tsunami early warning system for strong early warning capacities.

When a 1,600-kilometre (km) segment of the Indian tectonic plate jolted downward off the coast of Indonesia 6 years ago, it provoked the second strongest earthquake ever measured (a magnitude of 9.2) and tsunami waves 30 metres high. The resulting devastation brought home the urgent need for a system to give populations at risk from a tsunami as much warning as possible.

Germany was the first to take action with a joint German-Indonesian tsunami detection and warning system (GITEWS). The EU decided to take this innovation further by funding and launching DEWS in 2007 to provide protection to all Indian Ocean nations.

'It's almost impossible to give numbers, but if DEWS had been in place in December 2004 a very large number of lives could have been saved,' said Andreas Küppers of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Potsdam, German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ), the researcher in charge of DEWS.

The project is now being used to detect and analyse seismic events in the Indian Ocean, quickly assess their potential to unleash a tsunami, and warn at-risk countries through a network of detectors including broadband seismometers, land and ocean-surface based GPS instruments, tide gauges, and ocean bottom pressure control devices.

The data generated by these instruments is streamed via communication satellites to a central station in Jakarta, Indonesia for processing. SeisComP3 software, developed by the GFZ, rapidly determines the magnitude and location of a seismic event.

'The former systems needed 11 or 12 minutes to detect a signal and locate the source,' said Professor Küppers. 'The same can now be done in four minutes.'

Once the system detects an earthquake powerful enough to create a tsunami, it begins to analyse and model the risk of a tsunami. However, even with powerful computing capabilities, it would take too long to model a tsunami in real time. So DEWS researchers use libraries of temblors of different magnitudes and source locations, coupled with detailed simulations of the waves they would create along the Indian Ocean coastline, to determine which areas are at risk.

In addition to this time challenge, the DEWS team has also had to cope with the difficulties of having to warn 20 countries in a multitude of languages, many of whom do not see eye-to-eye politically. 'It is a multilingual system that can distribute different messages to different people in different languages,' Professor Küppers pointed out. 'It was even more difficult politically to get all the players together at one table, but we are well on our way to overcoming those problems as well.'

Researchers are now turning their attention to Europe and countries there at risk from tsunamis, namely those bordering the Mediterranean and the northeast Atlantic. They are even advocating the development of a new profession - that of the 'early warning engineer' - to offer maximum protection to vulnerable communities.

'If you want to tackle these problems properly, you have to take the time and effort to involve everybody,' said Professor Küppers. 'So we'd like to see people acquiring a new full-scale profession and be able to take care of the whole early warning field.'

>> Press release at CORDIS

Presentation at 76th OGC TC Meeting: "Usage of OASIS standards Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) and EDXL-DE in DEWS"

The usage of OASIS standards CAP and EDXL-DE in DEWS were prestented to the Early Warning and Disaster Management (EDM) Domain Working Group (DWG) at the 76th OGC Technical Committee Meeting in Bonn, Germany.

ogc  http://www.opengeospatial.org/event/1102tcagenda

 

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