After the major earthquake disasters in
Haiti and Japan, the high demand for
international collaboration on rapid
emergency response and disaster management
put the study of earthquakes into a new
perspective. These events demonstrated that geophysicists
must work effectively across research
groups and find ways to deliver their knowledge,
tools, and results to emergency planners and responders
in a timely way. As participants in the
emergency response efforts of the Japan 2011
earthquake organized by International Charter
(www.disasterscharter.org), our experiences
highlighted the lack of infrastructure for quickly
processing and distributing the huge amount of
geospatial data for emergency response. It’s important
to build a computational infrastructure
to support this transformation.