Abstract
Each year natural disasters take a huge toll in deaths and injuries, property damage, and economic loss. Much of this devastation can be reduced through greater public awareness of existing mitigation techniques. The National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) and its collocated World Data Center for Solid Earth Geophysics, Boulder, is using state-of-the-art World Wide Web tools for natural hazards education and public outreach. NGDC provides interactive search and retrieval capabilities for several natural hazards databases and an extensive collection of hazards photographs. NGDC also provides online educational opportunities through a Natural Hazards Quiz that tests the user's natural hazards IQ. Additional natural hazards data and information are provided through the online Natural Hazards Data Resources Directory (http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/seg/hazard/resource/). Long-term databases can be used to observe historic records of natural hazard event occurrences. These databases also educate the public about hot spots and trends of natural hazards. NGDC manages several earthquake, volcano, and tsunami databases. New Web technologies, such as interactive search and retrieval capabilities, are used to simplify access to these databases. For example, an Interactive Volcano Map allows users to view the locations of over 1,500 volcanoes. Users can zoom in and out of the map and obtain specific information such as the name, location, elevation, type, and status of the volcano (Figure 1). In addition, users can find out where and when earthquakes have caused deaths or damage by searching the online Significant Earthquake database which documents all events causing at least ten deaths and moderate damage. The results are displayed in a dynamically created HTML page based on user-specified criteria. NGDC also provides online access to metadata from the Earthquake Catalog CD-ROM set (1996). These CD's were jointly developed by the National Earthquake Information Center (USGS) and NGDC. …
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