Tsunami early warning and decision support

Abstract

An innovative newly developed modular and standards based Decision Support System (DSS) is presented which forms part of the German Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System (GITEWS). The GITEWS project stems from the effort to implement an effective and efficient Tsunami Early Warning and Mitigation System for the coast of Indonesia facing the Sunda Arc along the islands of Sumatra, Java and Bali. The geological setting along an active continental margin which is very close to densely populated areas is a particularly difficult one to cope with, because potential tsunamis' travel times are thus inherently short. National policies require an initial warning to be issued within the first five minutes after an earthquake has occurred. There is an urgent requirement for an end-to-end solution where the decision support takes the entire warning chain into account. The system of choice is based on pre-computed scenario simulations and rule-based decision support which is delivered to the decision maker through a sophisticated graphical user interface (GUI) using information fusion and fast information aggregation to create situational awareness in the shortest time possible. The system also contains risk and vulnerability information which was designed with the far end of the warning chain in mind – it enables the decision maker to base his acceptance (or refusal) of the supported decision also on regionally differentiated risk and vulnerability information (see Strunz et al., 2010). While the system strives to provide a warning as quickly as possible, it is not in its proper responsibility to send and disseminate the warning to the recipients. The DSS only broadcasts its messages to a dissemination system (and possibly any other dissemination system) which is operated under the responsibility of BMKG – the meteorological, climatological and geophysical service of Indonesia – which also hosts the tsunami early warning center. The system is to be seen as one step towards the development of a "system of systems" enabling all countries around the Indian Ocean to have such early warning systems in place. It is within the responsibility of the UNESCO Intergovernmental Oceonographic Commission (IOC) and in particular its Intergovernmental Coordinating Group (ICG) to coordinate and give recommendations for such a development. Therefore the Decision Support System presented here is designed to be modular, extensible and interoperable (Raape et al., 2010)

Applicability of the Decision Matrix of North Eastern Atlantic, Mediterranean and connected seas Tsunami Warning System to the Italian tsunamis

“…This strategy was initially introduced by the JMA (Japan Meteorological Agency) that is responsible for the Japanese TWS and has been recently adopted in other countries such as Indonesia where a TWS has been set up after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami mainly in cooperation with Germany in the frame of the joint German-Indonesia project GITEWS (Rudloff et al, 2009;Lauterjung at al., 2010) and Australia where a TWS is operational since 2009 (Allen and Greenslade, 2010). The process of decision in this case is based on observations and on tsunami model results, but in certain circumstances, especially for non-distant tsunamis, it might be a much more complicated task for the TWS operator and might require specific systems of decision support (see Steinmetz, 2010, for the GITEWS system) based on sophisticated information and communication technology tools, that are a real challenge for today and future research (e.g., see the efforts made within the ongoing European project TRIDEC for the development of a general purpose platform for early warning, including tsunami applications -http://www.tridec-online. eu/).…”

Research trends on hazards, disasters, risk reduction and climate change in Indonesia: a systematic literature review

“…One 300 notable initiative was the German Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning Systems (GITEWS) (e.g. Schlurmann and Siebert, 2011;Steinmetz et al, 2010). There are also a large number of publications which examine the role of knowledge and information to help the community be more prepared to disasters (Dicky et al, 2015;Hiwasaki et al, 2015;Rafliana, 2012).…”

Spatio-Temporal Decision Support System for Natural Crisis Management with TweetComP1

“…In the context of decision support or early warning, a strong focus needs to be placed on usability and integration aspects [9]. Most central to this is the possibility to browse and visualize social media data in real-time.…”