Disaster Mitigation Programs – November 28, 2012

One of the projects that I am working on this week involves trying to interest computer programmers around the world to consider starting work on the creation of an Internet based disaster mitigation CGI computer program. The following indirect link points to a demonstration structure that they could use for creating that program.

http://www.freewebs.com/eq-forecasting/Disaster_Response_System.html

Information regarding that proposed program was formally sent to U.S. government policy makers before the November 6, 2012 elections. FEMA and the United Nations should both be developing that type of Internet based disaster warning and response program.

One of the subsets or subroutines of that program would be some type of Internet based program that would enable earthquake forecasters around the world to easily and efficiently share their forecast data. As strange as it might seem after all of these years, there is no program of that type available anywhere on the Internet as far as I am aware.

As stated before, a major problem here is that most of the people doing earthquake forecasting work are researchers. And so their goal is to publish research papers and apply for grants etc. Their primary goals does not involve actually forecasting earthquakes and getting people out of the way. And because of that, they don’t make much of an effort to circulate forecast information.

If that information sharing step becomes extremely easy for those researchers then perhaps they will start doing an effective job of circulating their forecast data. However, as a group they are so disorganized along those lines that I am basically just guessing and hoping that that will be the case.

The only way to determine if they can do a better job of sharing forecast data is to get something organized along those lines and see if it works.

There are quite a few different types of forecast data available. And some of them look quite valuable such as Pavel’s ground tilt sensor data and the TEC data being evaluated by that other researcher or research group.

These are person opinions.