Early warning monitoring and management of disasters

Everyone would admit that disaster early warning is more important than later treatment and damage repair. If an effective tsunami early warning system had been in place in the Indian Ocean region on 26 December 2004, thousands of lives would have been saved. The same stark lesson can be drawn from other disasters that have killed tens of thousands of people in the past few years. Effective early warning systems not only save lives but also help protect livelihoods and assets created by national development. This paper addresses the issue of disaster early warning monitoring and management in a systemic manner and offers a general approach to a management solution. From the viewpoint of control theory, it depicts the disaster early warning monitoring and management as an information chain which has five links: disaster model bank link, disaster monitoring network link, disaster transmission channel, disaster analysis and management link and decision making and commanding link. The five links constitute an information loop, with disaster data being collected, processed through the chain and control information being fed back to the different links. With some vivid examples, this paper indicates the weakness of current links in the existing disaster early warning and management systems. On the basis of all the above analyses, the paper finally puts forward some suggestions in order to improve the performance of early warning monitoring and management of disasters.