Surveying, Mapping and GIS

A few weeks back I found a recent article about InSAR (Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar) for tracking subsurface movement quite fascinating, with a multitude of potential applications.

Today's Los Angeles Daily News is carrying an article discussing a $6M supercomputer system unveiled at Caltech a few months ago. This system can perform extensive seismic modeling tasks for post-quake rescue deployment, based on the model's analysis of most hard-hit communities and models of structural behavior in buildings.

Evidently the Caltech system tracks seismic waves, along with GPS data, and computes which areas have aftershocks likely, and which areas have buildings which are likely to sustain damage from a quake. The article also briefly touches on the use of GPS and InSAR to track subsurface stresses and to monitor what happens before, during and after an earthquake.

Per Lucy Jones, USGS, ultimately these modeling capabilities along with remote sensing methods for monitoring stresses and movement will need to be communicated with a broader community - structural engineers, architects and planners, building and zoning officials, as well as emergency responders, to be able to act as an integrated team for minimizing earthquake damage.

The Whittier Daily News also has an article today on the supercomputer, called CITerra, consisting of 25 racks of Dell PowerEdge blades, ranking the cluster as number 41 of the world's 500 most powerful supercomputers.