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The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is a voluntary consensus standards organization whose mission is to serve as a global collaborative forum for the development, promotion and harmonization of open and freely available geospatial standards. From the Alerting and Warning community perspective, the OGC believes that cross standards collaboration and harmonization is critical. To that end, the OGC does not define alerting or warning encoding or protocol standards. The OGC does actively participate in other standards organizations activities that do define and maintain encoding or protocol standards for alerts and warnings. These include collaboration activities with the IETF, OASIS, and NENA. The consistent expression of location in the emergency services and response stack increases effectiveness and reduces risk.
While the OGC does not define alerting encoding and protocol standards, the Membership does have a very active interest in geospatially enabled applications and infrastructures that do generate alerts and warnings. An example is the Debris Flow Monitoring System in Taiwan
In subsequent postings, I will describe a variety of OGC activities related to how OGC standards combined with existing alerting and warning standards, such as CAP, provide effective, operational applications and infrastructures that support the requirements of the alerting and warning community.
Earthquake Early Warning System Possible
Released: 12/14/2009 10:51:48 AM
An earthquake early warning system for California is feasible in coming years, according to research being presented Dec. 14-15 at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.
The ongoing study demonstrates that an earthquake early warning system for California is possible and lays out how such a system could be built.
Earthquake early warning systems, already successfully deployed in Mexico, Japan and Taiwan, can detect an earthquake in progress and provide notice of seconds to tens of seconds prior to actual ground shaking. Building on developments in other countries with significant earthquake risk, scientists are exploring early warning in the United States.
After a three-year earthquake early warning study funded by the U.S. Geological Survey was completed in August 2009, a second USGS-funded project was launched to integrate the previously tested methods into a single prototype warning system. When completed, this pilot system, called the California Integrated Seismic Network (CISN) ShakeAlert System, will provide warning to a small group of test users, including emergency response groups, utilities, and transportation agencies. While in the testing phase, the system will not provide public alerts.
The CISN ShakeAlert system will detect strong shaking at an earthquake’s epicenter and transmit alerts ahead of the damaging earthquake waves. The speed of an electronic warning message is faster than the speed of earthquake waves traveling through the earth. Potential applications include stopping elevators at the nearest floor, slowing or halting trains, monitoring critical systems, and alerting people to move to safer locations. In warning systems deployed abroad, alerts are distributed via TV and radio networks, the Internet, cell phones and pagers.
More at: http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=2366&from=news_side
