Congressional Natural Hazards Caucus

US Senators and members of the natural hazards community came together on June 21 to launch the Congressional Natural Hazards Caucus. The goal of the caucus is to provide information to decision makers about the nation's vulnerability to natural disasters, and to discuss ways of improving responses to these events. Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) and Senator John Edwards (D-North Carolina) co-chair the caucus, which already includes eighteen Senators. The activities of the caucus are supported by the Natural Hazards Caucus Working Group, of which the IRIS Consortium is a founding member along with the American Geophysical Union, the American Geological Institute, the Seismological Society of America,and others.

The inaugural session of the caucus included both a forum and a reception. At the forum, prominent witnesses such as Federal Emergency Management Agency Director James Lee Witt were the featured speakers.

Following the forum, a Senate reception was held to honor the caucus. The new IRIS/USGS museum exhibit on real-time seismicity was prominently displayed at the reception and drew a crowd of senior congressional staff and administration policy-makers. IRIS and SSA discussed global seismicity, distributed descriptions of EarthScope and the Advanced National Seismic System, and provided earthquake information sheets from the IRIS Education and Outreach program.

Seismologists Campaign for Open Data

Over 250 scientists from around the world signed a letter to the Treaty Organization in Vienna Austria calling for the open release of scientific data from the International Monitoring System that is being developed for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Members of the State Department have used the letter to support the US position for open data. The White House and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee have also been working on our behalf to gain open release of the data.

For further reading see:
van der Vink, G. and T. Wallace, Open data, International Law, and the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, Seismol. Res. Lett., 70, 663-665, 1999.

Dear Ambassador Vacek:

   It is the strong and unqualified consensus of the scientific community that all data from the International Monitoring System must be openly available without any restriction or delay. This consensus was most recently confirmed in a joint position statement issued by the American Geophysical Union, an international scientific society of more than 35,000 members, and the Seismological Society of America, representing 2,000 members from 70 countries.
    The scientific community has contributed extensively to the development of the International Monitoring System and has provided over half of the seismological stations that are currently being used. We have done so in the spirit of open cooperation and with the clear expectation that the data will be available not only for treaty monitoring, but also for scientific research and hazards mitigation. Modern seismological systems are rapidly evolving towards real-time automated data collection, distribution, analysis, and archiving. For the new systems, seismic data that can not be collected in real-time will effectively be unavailable.
    In response to earthquakes, openly available data allow us to analyze rapidly the event and assess the risk of aftershocks, thus greatly reducing the death toll. Requesting data or trying to predict in advance what data will be critical to which experts is impractical and would recklessly handicap our ability to respond during such times of extreme crisis.
    It is our hope that we can continue the strong cooperative arrangements that have already provided such demonstrated benefits to the International Monitoring System as well as to the broader interests of science and society. It is in this cooperative spirit that we urge you to strongly support full and unrestricted access to data. We stand ready to work with you to resolve any specific concerns.