Deputy Director David McGregor retired in August after 34 years
with the ISC. David joined the ISC as its first employee when it was
located at its original site in Oswald Road, Edinburgh, and continued
with the Centre at its subsequent homes in Edinburgh, Newbury, and
Thatcham. Together with former Director Anthony Hughes he was one of
the four people who moved with the ISC when it relocated to southern
England.
Educated as a geologist, David began his service with the ISC
developing computer programs, back when programmers carefully guarded
cabinets filled with precious punched cards. As time went on, he
transferred a growing library of programs from cards to tapes to disks
and modified them, first to run on IBM computers at
Rutherford-Appleton Lab and later to run on the ISC?s own VAX
computers.
David and his wife, Pat, opened their home over the years to
graciously host many ISC employees arriving from abroad. Pat also
often translated macroseismic reports for the Bulletin and abstracts
for the Bibliography.
In 1977 David became Deputy Director of the ISC and was responsible
amongst other duties for selecting the technologies that the ISC
embraced to collect, process and edit an ever-growing volume of
data. Over time, David became an important part of the Centre?s
institutional memory and his contribution to its development has been
uniquely valuable. He has generously offered to help recover data from
the ISC?s archive tapes as the Centre establishes a modern
database.
Dmitry Storchak Promoted to Senior Seismologist
Seismologist Dmitry Storchak has accepted a permanent appointment
as senior seismologist. Dmitry earned his Ph.D. in 1994 from the
Russian Academy Institute of Physics of the Earth. He has
participated in several seismic hazard analysis projects, including
compilation of catalogues for GSHAP. Dmitry first joined the ISC in
1995 for an INTAS-funded project on consolidation of data from
regional catalogues. He rejoined the Centre to edit the Bulletin
full-time on a two-year appointment from early 1997.
Dmitry is the longest-serving seismologist now at the Centre, and
has benefited from interaction with Robin Adams, Wayne Richardson,
Reinhard Mittag and Anthony Hughes. Over the last year, Dmitry has
helped to train Alison Bird and worked with Carol Tubby to develop a
new editing system that allows keying directly from marked listings.
Since it avoids manually writing event and record numbers to coding
sheets, the new system is both more efficient and less error
prone.
Dmitry, his wife Oxana and his daughter
Katya, who now may never lose her
distinctive "Berkshire" accent.
As recommended by the Executive Committee at its meeting in July,
the Centre has been seeking an additional seismologist to help reduce
the accumulated backlog in Bulletin production. We received
applications from many well-qualified candidates, and we were able to
choose among seismologists with outstanding credentials and years of
directly relevant experience.
Mr. Mamy Andrianirina of the Malagasy Republic has accepted a
two-year appointment at the Centre, and we expect him to join us in
November. Mamy holds university degrees in physics and chemistry and a
post-graduate diploma in seismology. He has located regional and
teleseismic earthquakes for the Institute and Observatory of
Geophysics, Antananarivo, since 1989. Mamy participated recently in
the seismology course of the International Institute of Seismology and
Earthquake Engineering in Japan, and Daisuke Suetsugu rates him as one
of the best participants in 35 years.
Stephen Cox, Executive Secretary of the Royal Society, paid an
informal visit to the ISC in August. Among other topics, Mr. Cox
offered suggestions on sources of supplementary funding, including the
Royal Society International Exchange Programme. With some other
funding agencies, such as the UK National Environment Research Council
and the European Science Foundation, the Royal Society may be able to
provide references to support applications from the ISC.
David Rendel, the local Member of Parliament, visited the ISC in
September. Mr. Rendel promised to support the ISC, and featured the
Centre in his weekly newspaper column the following week. He offered
suggestions on grants to support educational outreach programmes in
the ISC?s neighbourhood.
The complete Bulletin, January 1964 ? April 1996, is now available
from the ISC web site, at www.gxjydl.com/search/bulletin. Data from before
1994 were put on-line in late September following configuration of
further disk space.
The program for selecting events has been modified to include
magnitude and amplitude criteria. Users may now select events within
rectangular regions or based on distance from arbitrary
locations. There is a new option that begins to take advantage of the
hypertext capabilities of the web within the Bulletin data itself. If
the "include links" option is selected, each primary origin is
presented as a link to the associated phase readings and each Harvard
MW is linked to the complete solution for that event at the
Harvard University CMT Project web site.
Three further Sun workstations were installed at the ISC in
September, bringing the total to 5. With retirement of the VAX growing
ever closer, this is an important step in the Centre?s computer
modernisation programme, which is partially funded by the US
NSF. Putting computing capability on the desktop of each ISC staff
member will enable Centre operations to evolve away from batch
processing towards an interactive model.
One immediate benefit is a many-fold reduction in processing time;
runs that took several hours on the VAX take only a few minutes on the
Suns. Another benefit is that seismologists editing the Bulletin can
more easily link processes together, for example by leaving several
utilities running in separate windows and pasting results from one
into another.
The ISC has purchased the Oracle 8 relational database management
system. Migration of the ISC data to a coherent management system is
an important element in the Centre?s draft long-range plan (available
in Postscript format from www.gxjydl.com/doc). Ultimately, a
relational database is intended to replace the current system of
managing data in a variety of different formats as it is collected,
processed, edited and finally distributed to users. The management
system will provide quicker and more flexible data retrieval, which is
important as access to ISC data from its web site grows. The database
management system also helps to insure integrity of the data while
multiple users are updating it simultaneously. This is an essential
service for the ISC as it moves towards an interactive system for
editing the Bulletin.
The selection of Oracle 8 was based on Oracle?s strong position in
the data management software field, success of other seismic data
centres implementing Oracle data management systems, and favourable
pricing compared with other vendors. By sharing a common data
management system with other seismic data centres, the ISC may have
more opportunities to exchange lessons and perhaps even to share
software.
ISC Papers at the ESC
Dmitry Storchak and Ray Willemann each presented a paper at the
European Seismological Commission?s General Assembly in Tel Aviv
during August. Ray discussed ISC regional thresholds, described in
last quarter?s Update.
Dmitry?s paper, co-authored by Alison Bird and Robin Adams,
compared the locations of the same events in the Reviewed Event
Bulletin of the GSETT-3 IDC, the Earthquake Data Reports of the US
NEIS, and the ISC Bulletin. Most location discrepancies are less than
1° but several per cent exceed 5° and a few are greater than 20°. Even
for events as large as mb 5.5, discrepancies of several
degrees exist and are considerably greater than the standard
errors. Large discrepancies are more common in a few geographic
regions, especially New Caledonia, Kermadec, Fiji, Vanuatu, Myanmar,
Ryuku Islands, Hindu-Kush and East Africa.
From examination of typical examples, larger numbers of arrivals in
later bulletins can produce more reliable locations even where early
bulletins include no mis-associations. In other cases, the increasing
number of data and availability of analysis by regional seismologists
for later reports helps reveal mis-associations, enabling correction
of badly mislocated events in some cases.
Further details are
available.
Robin Adams, ISC?s senior seismologist from 1978 to 1995, lost his
wife, Thelma, to cancer in August. Robin is writing a book on
historical seismicity of Central America, and continues to spend a few
days at the Centre each week to consult its collection, use its
computing facilities, check for post, phone messages and e-mail, and
share his good spirits and wisdom with us.
