Minutes of the 2001 ASC Council Meeting at Hanoi

A Council Meeting of Asian Seismological Commission was held on 23 August, 2001 during the IAGA-IASPEI Joint Scientific Assembly at Hanoi, Vietnam. Dr. D. Rhoades, First Vice President, presided.

Twenty-seven delegates from 15 countries participated in the meeting.

Dr. M. Gheitanchi, Second Vice President and Prof. Zhu Chuanzhen, Secretary-General and Dr. G. Gibson.Ex-vice President, were present. Dr. S. Balassanian President, could not attend.

The Chairman welcomed the members and traced the development of ASC Prof. Zhu in 1993 suggested to IASPEI the founding of ASC. In 1996 IASPEI Regional Assembly in Tangshan, China, ASC Was formed in its first General Assembly. The second General Assembly Was held at Hyderabad, India in 1998 and the Third in Tehran, Iran during October 2000.

The 4th Asian Seismological Commission General Assembly (ASC 2002) to be held at Kathmandu, Nepal for 3 days during November-December 2002 was then discussed and approved. This proposal is from Mr. Amod Mani Dixit, General Secretary of the National Society for Earthquake Technology (NSET)-Nepal. The title of the Symposium to be held along with the General Assembly is "Symposium on Seismology , Earthquake Hazard Assessment and Earthqake Risk Management". After considerable discussion the symposium was decided to have the following sessions:

  1. Earthquake Source Physics, Processes, Precursors and Predictions.
  2. Recent devastating earthquakes Strong ground motion, Hazard Assessment and Risk Management.
  3. Seismotectonics and Paleoearthquakes.
  4. Heatflow, Volcanology, lithosphere and structure of the earth's interior.
  5. Recent trends in seismic networks, data processing, data exchange, GPS, Public awareness and related topics.

A pre-Assembly Training Course on "Earthquake Vulnerability Reduction for cities" was agreed to be conducted.

The following cooperative projects of ASC were identified:

  1. Seismic Risk Assessment in Asia
  2. Seismic Data Center in Asia
  3. Identification and adoption for detailed studies of the sites of next strong and dangerous earthquakes in Asia

A detailed discussion was held on Data Exchange and Seismic Data Center in Asia.

Dr. Gibson emphasized on cooperation of the Asian and Fareast Pacific Countries for Data Exchange and working out a common format for data exchange. He spoke about the experiences gained in the IASPEI Pre-Assembly workshop on Regional Seismological Cooperation held at Hanoi during August 13-18, 2001. He also proposed to have a private website of data. He informed that the Commission on developing countries is being closed down. Its role is to be taken by ASC.

Dr. Wu Zhongliang, Deputy Director of the Institute of Geophysics CSB, Beijing made an impressive powerpoint presentation on the proposed Asian Data Center at Beijing, the Data Center is proposed to have archives of waveforms, modern parameters like fault mechanism, source time function, rupture history. etc, besides the hypocenter. Various other supporting data such as geodetic parameters will also be archived. The meeting has taken a positive view of the proposal and suggested Dr. Wu to submit a proposal to the ASC Bureau for circulation amongst the member countries and their consent.

Dr. Kim of South Korea proposed that the journal published from Korea may be taken as the journal of the ASC, the meeting decided to have discussion on this issue in a workshop at Kathmandu Assembly.