Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
I
NTRODUCTION
An. G. Marchuk
In the late 1980-s, a custom system with GISelements for simulating
tsunami waves was designed at the Institute of Computational Mathematics
and Mathematical Geophysics (formerly the Computing Center) in
Novosibirsk. The system allowed setting an elliptic model source of the
tsunami and then calculating the arrival times of tsunami waves at all grid
nodes of the modeling domain using two built-in programs, as well as
estimating the height and velocity wave components in subregions selected
from a large offshore and coastal area. The digital geographic map had a
complex structure, with the coastline and sea depth contours presented in a
vector format and the land topography and bathymetry displayed by different
colors on the computer screen. The system was first demonstrated in 1989
during the International Tsunami Symposium [8]; its description was reported
at the All-Union Tsunami Workshop in 1990 [9] and at the XX IUGG General
Assembly in 1991 [10], and in
Computing Technologies
[11]. Concurrently, a
lot of work was initiated by A. Mikheeva in 1990 to develop an independent
GIS for visualizing the Earthquake and Tsunami Database on a map and to
collect information for the Database [12].
In 1994 the systems were combined into an expert system (Expert
Tsunami Database, ETDB) for visualizing earthquake and tsunami catalogs
with the possibility of modeling different scenarios of tsunami generation and
propagation from model sources [13]. A modification of ETDB [14] was
recommended as a prototype for regional Tsunami Databases at the Fifteenth
Session of the International Coordination Group of UNESCO for the Tsunami
Warning System in the Pacific [15]. At the same time, Anna Mikheeva and
Petr Dyadkov began to develop a parallel version of an expert system (Figure
1) for seismicity studies in the Baikal region (Expert Earthquake Database,
EEDB), at the Trofimuk Institute of Petroleum Geology and Geophysics
(Novosibirsk). It was gradual transition from a usual GIS and DB to a high-
tech expert system updated by including successively various mathematical
methods for earthquake data processing, new seismicity parameters, and
advanced representation tools.
The term ―expert" in the name of these systems reflects one of its basic
features: providing the user with necessary information and advanced
techniques for specific research tasks.
