Description:
Director Lee Allison's Report ~
In Fiscal Year 2014, the Arizona Geological Survey (AZGS) maintained
its core functions in addressing natural hazards and natural resources
in Arizona, and not only cemented our role as a national leader in
geoinformatics or geoscience cyberinfrastructure but expanded our
impact globally as well.
AZGS geologists responded to natural hazards including debris flows
and landslides following wild fires, the magnitude 5.3 Duncan Arizona
earthquake, and a plethora of new or expanded earth fissures resulting
from monsoon downpours. The deadly landslides in Washington and
Colorado this past year prompted us to reallocate a modest amount
of internal funds to start a statewide inventory of known landslides,
something never before undertaken. A full inventory, characterization,
and assessment will be a multi-year effort, assuming we can continue to
support the work.
We made substantial progress in getting the hundreds of thousands of
pages of reports and files gathered by the former Arizona Department of
Mines & Mineral Resources digitized, georeferenced, and online at the
interactive Arizona Geological Survey Mining data website.
Our Phoenix operations moved out of temporary space to co-locate with
the Arizona Department of Water Resources, with much better public
access and enhanced ability to collaborate between our agencies.
One of the highlights of the year was the formal launch of the National
Geothermal Data System (NGDS) by U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest
Moniz at the White House Energy Datapalooza, in Washington, DC in
May 2014. NGDS went operational as a federated data network with
over 10 million data records covering 30 different types of data, from
60+ contributing data providers in all 50 states. AZGS has managed this
Department of Energy project since 2010 on behalf of the Association
of American State Geologists. NGDS is the largest application of the US
Geoscience Information Network (USGIN).
We spun off USGIN Foundation, Inc. as a non-profit company to
commercialize the services and turn NGDS into a sustainable operation.
The USGIN data framework meets all the requirements of the White
House Open Data Access Initiative, and has wide applicability to other
resources beyond geothermal, including petroleum, minerals, and water,
and natural hazards.
The Arizona Natural Resources Review Council adopted USGIN as
the basis of a Natural Resources Decision Support System linking data,
documents, and maps among the nine state environment, resource,
and transportation agencies, to better enable the State of Arizona to
respond effectively to the thousands of federal agency land use and land management proposals made every year.
The AZGS took on a major project for the National
Science Foundation (NSF) to design and test a
community-led governing structure for geoscience
cyberinfrastructure under the EarthCube program. It is a
dramatic departure from how scientific organizations are
set up, and is intended to build community consensus
on a system architecture, a challenge the community has
struggled with for 15 years.
Following on the heels of early EarthCube successes,
NSF asked AZGS to lead the US Secretariat for the
Belmont Forum e-Infrastructure and Data Management
project in partnership with colleagues from the
University of Reading in the United Kingdom. I
serve as co-chair of the project’s international Steering
Committee with representatives from 13 nations’ science
funding agencies, the European Union, International
Council for Science, and International Social Science
Council. We have an 18-month process, with 120
experts in science, technology, legal and security issues
from the participating countries, to produce a strategic
plan for enabling global change research.
The AZGS’ growing national and global presence
is paying dividends on multiple levels. The digital
technologies we are developing are being put to work on
the State’s Natural Resources Decision Support System,
at our new portal for digital mines and mineral resources,
and at the interactive, online Natural Hazards in Arizona
viewer. This is critical since AZGS funding continues to
be dominated by external grants. The State appropriation
for AZGS is less than 10% of our total budget, as
it has been for several years. The grants we bring in
help support basic operations of the agency so that we
continue to maintain all the services to Arizona that we
provided prior to the recession and the substantial cuts
that all agencies took.
In summary, AZGS helped save lives and property from
natural hazards, supported the wise development of our
natural resources, is making Arizona a global leader in
cyber technology, and has become an entrepreneurial
center of economic development. This report provides
more details on these activities and perspectives from the
geologists and others on staff who are carrying out the
work.
M. Lee Allison
State Geologist
& Director