Integrated Research and Capacity Building in Geophysics
Raymond J. Willemann, IRIS Consortium
Arthur Lerner-Lam, Columbia University
Andrew Nyblade, Pennsylvania State University
Out of Africa – Into Southeast Asia and the Americas
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.
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 workshop’s 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Instrumentation
Each cutting-edge
seismic station of
the EarthScope
project in the US
requires only
about $25,000 of
instrumentation.
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.
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.
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 middleincome countries, coupled to cooperation in training, education,
research, and commitments to open data.
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 nocost 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.
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 be
integrated.
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.