Out of Africa: Geophysical Monitoring and Capacity Building around the World, Boston Massachusetts Workshop, February 18-19, 2008

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0802867SimpsonThis award, co-funded with the NSF Office of International Science and Engineering, will support a workshop in Boston, MA on February 18-19, 2008 that will bring together key members of the IRIS community with seismologists from several countries in Central America, South America and Southeast Asia. We intend to build strategies for transitioning networks of earthquake monitoring stations in developing countries into fully sustainable networks of advanced seismic observatories. Modern observatory networks can support international research and educational collaborations through standards-driven data acquisition, management and open access. The US seismology community is poised to take advantage of a recent increase in resources from development and disaster recovery agencies for building networks in low- and middle-income countries to foster seismographic networks outside the US for several reasons. First, an NSF/OISE PIRE award to Pennsylvania State University helped to establish AfricaArray, which has strengthened many international scientific collaborations, deployed a set of seismographs in SubSaharan Africa, and demonstrated that developing a permanent seismic network can provide critical new data for imaging Earth structure while also strengthening scientific capacity building and supporting hazard monitoring. Second, IRIS's initial investment in several regional networks through its long-term loan program of refurbished RefTek data loggers has provided another successful model on which to build.The specific goals for the workshop are to (1) enumerate leading regional science objectives that require long time series of high-fidelity seismological waveform records, (2) identify broader regional social benefits from improved seismological capacity and sophisticated data products, (3) suggest mechanisms for assessing the technical capacities and performance of new and existing regional and national networks, and (4) introduce development experts and aid providers to the need for integrated network solutions. One outcome will be a report, prepared by the workshop organizers, on the opportunities for developing geophysical observing systems linked to capacity building.