Scientists make strides in tsunami warning

The 2004 tsunami led to greater global cooperation and improved techniques for detecting waves that could reach faraway shores, even though scientists still cannot predict when an earthquake will strike.

A decade ago, scientists did not have a tsunami warning system in place in the Indian Ocean, because there had been no recent history of tsunamis there.

The world’s main monitoring body, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre headquartered at Hawaii’s Ewa Beach, was focused on volatile areas prone to earthquakes along the Pacific Ring of Fire, including Japan and South America.

“We weren’t on the proper footing to be able to quickly respond to an event of the size that it was,” Mike Angove, tsunami program branch director at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told AFP.

After the disaster, US tsunami experts began monitoring the Indian Ocean while the international community established a new system that was eventually implemented last year.

Australia, Indonesia and India have now taken charge of a monitoring body known as the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning System.

The United States nearly doubled its staff at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre from eight to 15, and its tsunami warning centres in Hawaii and Alaska continue to be staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

“The scientific community of tsunami scientists has exploded since 2004,” Eddie Bernard, scientist emeritus at NOAA, told a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco this week.

Scientists can do now is better predict the waves that spread to faraway shores, Angove said.

“We have made incredible progress there, in terms of being able to identify those waves as they are moving out across the deep ocean, model them and turn those into meaningful forecasts for those distant shores, and that could be as short as an hour away.”

Scientists can measure these waves with the help of buoys known as Deep-Ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunami (DART). Each unit has a pressure gauge on the seafloor that detects tsunami activity and send information by acoustic modem to the buoy.

Then, the buoy sends the data by satellite to the US tsunami warning centres in Hawaii and Alaska, where it is sent out over the Internet.

In 2011, following the magnitude 9 earthquake off Japan, “there were three DART buoys that detected the tsunami first.  Two American buoys and one Russian,” Bernard said.

“If the same Indian Ocean tsunami were to occur today, we believe we might still lose many, but it would be on the order of tens of thousands of people as compared to 240,000,” said Vasily Titov, director of NOAA’s Centre for Tsunami Research in Seattle.