October 2009 Issue

During the months of September and October, GEM continued its effort to reach out to the community, through an intensive programme of meetings, formal and informal presentations, some of which are listed below:
- 2nd Conference of the OECD International Network, Bangkok, 24-25 September
- 3rd World Forum of Catastrophe Programmes Meeting, Taipei, 28-30 September
- OECD Global Science Forum meeting, Krakow, 5-6 October
- IUA Catastrophe Modelling Seminar, London, 8 October
- CERESIS International Conference, Lima, 14 October
- Managing Risk & Funding Recovery Conference, Amsterdam, 15 October
- IIASA-DPRI Conference on IDRM, Kyoto, 15-17 October
- PEER annual meeting, San Francisco, 16 October
- UNESCO RELEMR Conference, Lisbon, 26-28 October
- EC/ISDR International Workshop on Disaster Risk Reduction, Brussels, 28-30 October

A 24-page GEM booklet has just been printed and is being globally distributed. The document provides insight into how GEM is going to reach its goals, presents GEM’s financial plan for the first five years of activities, outlines GEM’s unique features, output and vision on the future. Whilst you may download a digital copy from here, we will be happy to provide you with as many hard-copies as you require (e.g. to distribute amongst interested individuals in your organisation, country or region); just send a request to chiara.pigoli@globalquakemodel.org.

The GEM1 team has been making steady progress since the work started in January, and is about to present its preliminary results to a panel of 13 external international experts - the Model Advisory Group (MAG), that will be gathering during the first week of November, in Zurich. In what follows we provide a very short overview of GEM1 activities thus far:
• A review of global databases (social, physical and economic) has taken place; exposure databases, such as GRUMP and PAGER, and consequences databases, such as EM-DAT (CRED) and NatCat Service (Munich Re), have all been reviewed.
• The Hazard group has implemented the GEM1 hazard computational infrastructure, has collected PSHA input models from all regions of the world and is working on the calculation of a first demonstrative global seismic hazard map.
• The Risk group has been evaluating existing seismic risk software through urban and regional test-bed applications, is designing a seismic risk engine for GEM, featuring a logic tree framework, analytical and empirical vulnerability methods. Preliminary demonstrative global seismic risk maps, based on empirical vulnerability functions, are also being developed.
• The IT group is working on three fronts: the design of the model building and computational infrastructure, the design of the database model and data interchange formats and the design of the web portal architecture.
• A User Needs Assessment has been devised and deployed, as discussed above.

Are you curious about the GEM1 team? Click here for their details.

The already active Regional Programmes in Europe (SHARE) and the Middle-East (EMME) continue to make good progress, with SHARE in particular currently focusing on the collecting of state-of-the art data to create harmonized and homogeneous datasets: a European-Mediterranean earthquake catalogue, seismogenic source zone models, strong and weak ground motion databases, and ground-motion prediction equations.
Progress is also being made in other regions, such as Asia, Latin America, Africa:
• a South-East Asia focused meeting, involving delegates from Australia, Singapore and New Zealand was held in Singapore on 7-8 September. As a follow up, an effort is now underway to identify the research needs in the region, together with the key players that will need to be brought on board, and which would then be involved in a workshop to be organised in April.
• in New Delhi, a meeting hosted by RMSI on September 21-22 led to the definition of the preliminary structure and organization of a Regional Programme for the South Asia region. In collaboration with all relevant academic/research institutions, governmental bodies and private players, AIR-India is now leading the initial efforts of putting together a proposal that will then be submitted to potential funding agencies.
• the South-America region was instead the subject of the CERESIS Governing Board meeting that took place in Lima on the 14-15 of October. A proposal for a regional programme in the region had been submitted to the Inter-American Development Bank back in June, and official news on the possible funding of such initiative is expected to arrive soon.
• a second Africa GEM Workshop has been organised by the University of Nairobi and ESARSWG in Nairobi, for 12-13 November. The gathering should feature the participation of close to 30 experts from the region, and will hopefully move us one step closer to the definition of a regional programme in this part of the world.

From the recently published booklet: “Regional and national implementation is a key feature of GEM that will ensure researchers and scientists from all regions of the world are actively involved in the building of the global model”. Do not hesitate in contacting us if you wish to collaborate in the setting up of a GEM Programme in your region.

The reports from the 14 international peer reviewers that were asked to assess the proposals that were submitted in response to GEM's first round of Request for Proposals (RfPs) for the Hazard Global Components have now been received. Based on these reviews, as well as on its own internal review process, the Scientific Board will now be preparing a proposals evaluation report for the Governing Board, which will then take the final decisions on the matter, in its meeting of 3-4 December. Projects should then initiate in January 2010, after a brief negotiation phase.

For what concerns the Risk Global Components, as mentioned above, the current drafts for the possible Requests for Proposals are open for public commentary through GEM’s online peer review system. It is hoped that the reviewed and revised RfPs will then be released at the end of the year.

As far as the Socio-Economic Impact Global Components are concerned, the brainstorming workshop held at OECD headquarters on September 16 (see photos) led to the identification of two main areas of possible activities, one focusing on impact indicators and another focusing on indirect consequences modelling. A smaller working group of seven experts from academia, industry, World Bank and OECD, is now working on the drafting of a possible roadmap, which, similarly to the Risk GCs, is then likely to be subject of a public commentary process.