HR: 1340h
AN: OS23D-1363    [Abstracts]
TI: Managing and Distributing Historical Tsunami Catalogs via the Web
AU: * Dunbar, P K
EM: Paula.Dunbar@noaa.gov
AF: National Geophysical Data Center, NOAA E/GC1 325 Broadway, Boulder, CO 80305-3328 United States
AB: Advances in internet technology have made it easy to "publish" data. The challenge now lies in meaningful presentation of these data. The National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) and co-located World Data Center for Solid Earth Geophysics, Boulder, publishes large amounts of heterogeneous data on the web, including several historical tsunami catalogs that have been merged into one digital database. These catalogs vary in geographic as well as time coverage. They also have different quality levels and histories. Since historical tsunami data are valuable in the verification and testing of numerical models, it is important to know the quality of the data. It is our responsibility to make this information available with the data. NGDC is addressing this problem by developing a system that supports internal data management and improvement as well as public access to these data. These tools include a data dictionary, quality assessment tools built on relational database management systems (RDBMS), and web-based interfaces designed for many audiences. Storing the data in a RDBMS facilitates the integration of several tables related to a database, such as additional comments and references. For example, NGDC is in the process of scanning several original source documents that include eyewitness accounts of tsunami effects and making this information available as hyperlinks from the web pages. The RDBMS also facilitates the integration of several related databases, such as tsunami sources, tsunami runups, and significant earthquakes. All of these tools are more powerful when they are combined with a GIS-driven spatial selection tool integrated into an internet mapping environment. The maps provide integrated web-based GIS access to individual GIS layers including tsunami sources, tsunami effects, significant earthquakes, volcano locations, and various spatial reference layers such as topography, population density, and political boundaries. The map service also provides ftp links and hyperlinks to additional hazards information such as the NGDC collection of hazards photos.
UR: http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/seg/hazard/tsu.shtml
DE: 7200 SEISMOLOGY
DE: 4500 OCEANOGRAPHY: PHYSICAL
DE: 4564 Tsunamis and storm surges
DE: 0910 Data processing
SC: Ocean Sciences [OS]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting