Integrated Research and Capacity Building in Geophysics

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Integrated Research and Capacity Building in
Geophysics Raymond J. Willemann, IRIS
Consortium Arthur Lerner-Lam, Columbia
University Andrew Nyblade, Pennsylvania State
University
Abstract There have been special opportunities
over the past several years to improve the ways
that newly-constructed geophysical observatories
in Southeast Asia and the Americas are linked
with educational and civil institutions. Because
these opportunities have been only partially
fulfilled, there remains the possibility that new
networks will not fully address desired goals or
even lose operational capabilities. In contrast,
the AfricaArray project continues to progress
towards goals for linkages among education,
research, mitigation and observatories. With
support from the Office of International Science
and Education at the US National Science
Foundation, we convened a workshop to explore
lessons learned from the AfricaArray experience
and their relevance to network development
opportunities in other regions. We found closer
parallels than we expected between geophysical
infrastructure in the predominantly low-income
countries of Africa with low risk of geophysical
disasters and the mostly middle-income countries
of Southeast Asia and the Americas with high risk
of geophysical disasters. Except in larger
countries of South America, workshop participants
reported that there are very few geophysicists
engaged in research and observatory operations,
that geophysical education programs are nearly
non-existent even at the undergraduate university
level, and that many monitoring agencies continue
to focus on limited missions even though closer
relationships researchers could facilitate new
services that would make important contributions
to disaster mitigation and sustainable
operations. Workshop participants began
discussing plans for international research
collaborations that, unlike many projects of even
the recent past, would include long-term capacity
building and disaster mitigation among their
goals. Specific project objectives would include
national or regional hazard mapping, development
of indigenous education programs, training to
address the needs of local monitoring agencies,
strategic international university partnerships,
commitments to open data, and installation of
permanent analysis systems that include
open-source software. Such projects are
intrinsically more complex than pure research
partly because they require funding from multiple
sources to address diverse goals but experience
in Africa suggests that integrated programs
contribute to long-term capacity building in ways
that projects founded on basic research questions
may not.

• Out of Africa Into Southeast Asia and the
  Americas
• IRIS held a workshop during February 2008 that
  brought together key members of the US academic
  seismology community with earthquake
  seismologists in Southeast Asia, South America,
  and Middle America. The US seismology community
  is poised to foster geophysical networks outside
  the US because modern observatory networks can
  support international research and educational
  collaborations through standards-driven data
  acquisition, data management and open data
  exchange. The workshops goal was to build
  strategies for transitioning networks of
  earthquake monitoring stations in developing
  countries into fully sustainable networks of
  advanced geophysical observatories and introduce
  development experts and aid providers to the need
  for integrated network solutions. A workshop
  report is in preparation.
• Large investments in scientific research are an
  attribute of wealthy countries, recognized as
  both a facilitator of economic growth and as an
  indicator of ability to afford investments
  with only long-term payoffs. The complementary
  roles of science as a growth facilitator and as
  wealth indicator suggest that externally funding
  startup research within low- and middle-income
  countries might engender a virtuous circle of
  accelerating economic development and internal
  funding for science.
• The benefits from research that facilitate growth
  are well known scientific investment can
  develop technological capability, improve health
  care, afford protection from natural disasters,
  and increase supplies of food, energy and mineral
  resources. And yet even large, multi-year
  projects in low- and middle-income countries
  often fail to foster advances among an indigenous
  scientific community that continue without
  ongoing external investment.
• Seismology ought to be well suited to stimulating
  coupled, internally driven economic and
  scientific development.
• Earthquake risk is large and growing in many
  developing countries.
• Seismic exploration is an effective method of
  resource discovery.
• Fundamental advances are still made in
  seismology with relatively low-cost instruments
  and freely available data.
• International cooperation and data exchange are
  indispensable to seismological research.
• Few academic seismologists are constrained from
  sharing data by commercial partnerships.
• Despite these promising features, international
  seismology projects often encounter obstacles to
  capacity building, limiting long-term benefits
  to enhanced reputations among scientists
  in high-income countries and opportunities for
  ambitious students to emigrate.

Education The number of fully educated
geophysicists is insufficient in all three
geographic regions on which the workshop focused,
with deleterious effects on natural hazard
monitoring and resource exploration. A broad
range of education initiatives will be required
to address the scarcity of fully educated
geophysicists. Recommendation Strong geophysical
educational programs in Asia and the Americas
ought to be expanded to include students from
neighboring countries. US universities with
ongoing international geophysical research ought
to establish strategic partnerships with foreign
educational institutions and engage in
coordinated cluster. Geophysical summer field
course programs ought to be established with US
participation as teachers and students.
Each cutting-edge seismic station of the
EarthScope project in the US requires only about
25,000 of instrumentation.
Instrumentation Recent advances in
instrumentation bring significantly better
capabilities within the grasp of seismologists
everywhere. Nevertheless, there are challenges in
making best use of modern instrumentation that
are aggravated by inadequate training and more
frequent instrument failures in tropical
environments. Recommendation Regional
development agencies ought to fund projects to
develop instruments that would perform more
reliably in different environmental conditions.
High-income countries ought to provide
standardized sets of instrumentation to low- and
middle-income countries, coupled to cooperation
in training, education, research, and commitments
to open data.
Explosive urban growth of cities such as
Dhaka, Bangladesh, exposes larger populations to
earthquake hazard and makes them more vulnerable
to disruption of essential services.
A proposed network in Chile of 65 broadband
seismic stations and 140 GPS stations with
real-tme telemetry will pose significant software
and data management challenges, especially if
data from Argentina and other nearby
countries are to beintegrated.
Software Network processing packages offer
complete solutions for routine operations,
including data collection and management and
computation of earthquake locations and
magnitudes. Some packages are costly, even by the
standards of US academics. The choice of the
network processing package can make it difficult
to use the data in certain other programs, which
are developed continuously by loosely coordinated
investigators and which are often required to
produce important new products. Recommendation
Owners of proprietary software ought to provide
no-cost or low-cost licenses to users in low- and
middle-income countries. Documentation for a
specialized product program ought to include
advice on using the program with different
network processing packages.
USGS training to facilitate reliable operations,
advanced analysis, and secure data management has
been an essential component in creating a
sustainable Caribbean tsunami warning system.
Training Training for specific skills is a
critical need in many countries, partly because
of the scarcity of broadly and fully educated
geophysicists. There are several international
training programs in seismology, but coordination
between the programs is all but nonexistent, most
of them serve any given location too
intermittently to build capacity, and some of
them are not well focused on achieving clearly
stated objectives. Recommendation International
regional geophysics organizations ought survey
existing capabilities and publish summaries of
regional training requirements. International
training programs ought to compare the objectives
and content of their programs and
offer complementary courses in selected
geographic regions that cumulatively build
capacity toward clearly stated goals.
Data Management Just as in the US, moving towards
more open data exchange would probably progress
gradually in a process that includes governments
and other funding organizations growing
accustomed to evaluating the network operators
by how widely the data are used. Confidence
building measures might demonstrate advantages to
open data, but risk both complacency (the
measures might be misperceived as acceptable
long-term arrangements) and a slippery slope
(progressively more networks might adopt
restrictive data policies). There might be
less resistance to freely distributing data
through regional centers, perhaps one within each
of South America, Middle America and Southeast
Asia to share data. Recommendation International
seismological organizations representing
consensus among network operators in different
geographic regions ought to propose confidence
building measures for archiving data
at the IRIS DMC that address the risks of
complacency and slippery slope. In parallel,
seismological network operators ought to make
plans for regional management of open data.