Newsletter - February 2010 Issue

After more than a year of hard work, the GEM1 project is approaching its conclusion; after March 31st all deliverables will be made available to the Model Advisory Group, a group of 15 experts from around the globe that, following its mid-term review of November 2009, will now once again review the operandi of GEM1, at the end of April, in Pavia.

The review will not only focus on checking the technical-scientific quality of GEM1 deliverables, but will also be providing recommendations on how the GEM1 efforts should then be transposed and integrated with the various operative instruments of GEM (Global Components, Regional Programmes, Model Facility) that will lead to the development and establishment of the open-source, dynamic and uniform global seismic risk model.

This integrated model development effort will be coordinated by the Secretariat’s Executive Committee, under the guidance of GEM’s Scientific Board and the periodic scientific review of the Technical Advisory Panel, which consists of external international experts from the fields of hazard, risk, socio-economic impact and IT.

As mentioned above, the GEM Model Infrastructure brings together, under the dedicated operational coordination of the Executive Committee, the technical input from GEM’s Global Components and Regional Programmes with the IT capacity of the GEM Model Facility. The latter will thus be responsible for:

• leading the development of an open-source, web-mounted platform for integrating hazard, risk and socio-economic impact assessment tools and data (OpenGEM);
• assembling and maintaining global data of relevance for GEM and manage a dedicated computing cluster as well as access to distributed High Performance Computing facilities;
  
• interacting, from an operational viewpoint, with a wide variety of contributors and users groups,including those involved in GEM’s Regional Programmes, as well as international agencies, national services and industry.
  

The Swiss Seismological Service (SED) at ETH Zurich has been selected by the Governing Board to host and operate the GEM Model Facility, and a vacancy has been opened for an experienced and highly motivated individual to serve as its manager. Visit the GEM job vacancies page to find out more about the position.

The work for the Hazard Global Components is about to start; final rounds of negotiations are ongoing with the five consortia whose proposals were selected (they will soon be announced on the website). Coordinators of these consortia will be invited to take part in the GEM1 review meeting described above, for the necessary integration of efforts and products.

The RfPs for the Risk Global Components were released on January 18th 2010, inviting international consortia to respond by submitting proposals before the 18th of March 2010. The full text of the RfPs, a background document explaining the relation between them and submission guidelines can be found online.

Constructive discussions during a third brainstorming meeting of the Socio-Economic Impact working group that took place at the end of January in Pavia, has led to a revised version of the SEI Module roadmap. The latter will be published online in March/April of this year, with a request for public commentary by the community at large.

At the end of April, in tandem with the GEM1 review meeting, the coordinators of Regional Programmes that are both active (Europe, Middle-East) and in-preparation (Central Asia, South-East Asia, Africa, South America, etc) will be meeting with the coordinators of the Hazard Global Components, the GEM1 and Model Advisory Groups teams, the GEM Executive Committee and Scientific Board.

This event will not only aim at facilitating the necessary integration of all on-going efforts, but it should also hopefully provide a further impetus to the Regional Programmes that have not yet been kick-started.

The GEM Outreach Meeting 2010 is being held in tandem with the Understanding Risk conference on innovation in disaster risk management organised by the GFDRR (World Bank) in cooperation also with UN-ISDR and others. The event will be taking place from 1-4 June 2010 in Washington DC.

At this annual conference, GEM will be presenting the blueprint for the computational infrastructure; there will be interactive demonstrations of the first version of the ‘OpenGEM’ system, and preliminary global hazard maps and several exemplificative risk applications will be presented. Furthermore, participants will get an up-to-date insight into the various global, regional and IT components that comprise GEM.

Whilst GEM would very much like all of its associated community (of several thousands of individuals already) to take part in this event, obvious logistics and financial constraints imply that only a percentage of the former may take part. Invitations will be sent out at the beginning of March.

For more information on the Understanding Risk conference and to get involved in discussions on the various themes of the conference and GEM, go to www.understandrisk.org.