Ocean Observations Required to Minimize Uncertainty in Global Tsunami Forecasts, Warnings, and Emergency Response

Abstract

Reducing Tsunami Forecast and Warning Uncertainty other emerging techniques, and state-of-the-art modeling and computational resources, these capabilities will enable more timely and accurate tsunami detection, measurement, and forecasts. Because of these advances in detection and measurement, the opportunity exists to greatly reduce and/or quantify uncertainties associated with forecasting tsunamis. Providing more timely and accurate information related to tsunami location, arrival time, height, inundation, and duration would improve public trust and confidence and fundamentally alter tsunami emergency response. Additionally, this capability could be integrated with related fields (e.g., storm surge, sea-level rise, tide predictions, and ocean forecasting) to develop and deploy one continuous, real-time, accurate depiction of the always moving boundary that separates ocean from coast and, sometimes, life from death.

Observing the Oceans Acoustically

“…The direct estimates of ocean state variables from acoustic tomography and acoustically located and navigated autonomous platforms operating in undersampled high-latitude regions will improve ocean state estimation (Heimbach et al, 2019). The rich applications of hydroacoustic monitoring from the CTBTO IMS demonstrate that additional observations from fixed acoustic transceiver nodes, coupled with soundscape maps provided by PAM, are important components of Eulerian observational systems, including tsunami warning (Angove et al, 2019).…”

SMART Cables for Observing the Global Ocean: Science and Implementation

“…One of the most pressing issues in the tsunami warning community concerns the ability to distinguish destructive tsunamis from those measurable on sea-level gauges but which do not pose a hazard along distant coastlines (Angove et al, 2019). Since the US tsunami warning system began in 1949, 75% of the evacuations of Hawaii's coastlines have been unnecessary, with direct and indirect costs of millions or tens of millions of dollars per event.…”

“…They are directly relevant to time and space dependent sea level rise estimates, measuring the component associated with increased water mass from melting land ice (Stammer et al, 2013;Ponte et al, 2019). The pressure data will feed directly into tsunami warning centers to improve early warning with better spatial and temporal sampling and array availability (Angove et al, 2019).…”

Reviewing global development of multi-hazard early warning system with the perspective of its development in Indonesia

“…The first is the speed of processing observed data into the warning information and the accuracy and timeliness in disseminating it to the coastal community at risk. The second lies in the effort to leverage the level of preparedness at the community level is "tsunami ready" [17].…”

“…Regarding observations related to geo-hazard is opted to establish an integrated observation system that consolidates land and sea observations as well as remote sensing. Discussion of the various types of observation equipment is reported in more depth on [17] as the result of TOWS WG Meeting on February 2018 [18].…”