In June 2013, GDACS was migrated to new servers. The old system was still available as backup under the URL http://w1.gdacs.org. This system has now been shut down. If you have any links pointing to that URL, they will not longer work.

Australian users may have experienced problems with receiving SMS alerts from GDACS in the past months. We noticed a while ago that all SMS traffic to Australian mobile numbers was not processed well by our SMS provider. We’ve since worked with the provider on a solution, which was tested with a few users this week. All traffic to Australian mobile numbers should now be routed correctly.

The JRC will shortly upgrade hardware and software underlying the GDACS monitoring, alert and public web system. User registration and changes to the alert profile will be unavailable for a short time, but other changes should be transparent. The main changes are:

• Complete overhaul of the Earthquake and Tsunami system for better performance and with new alert models for tsunamis, support for national sub-systems and for different alert scales
• Upgrade of the geospatial database system from ArcGIS Server 9.3 to 10, with new features for better maps
• Migration of hardware from JRC corporate web zone to a dedicated subnet with more flexibility for scaling and deploying new beta products, and reducing the servers from 15 to 8 more powerful ones in a new architecture.

The new system can be previewed on http://w2.gdacs.org. Please let us know if you notice bugs with services you're using, in particular for syndicated feeds. After the switch (which will be announced in a further message), the old system will be available on http://w1.gdacs.org. Please don't hesitate to contact us for further information.