The Hindu : Tamil Nadu News : `Indian tsunami warning system will be superior to the Pacific variety'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Feb 24, 2005

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

`Indian tsunami warning system will be superior to the Pacific variety'

By Our Special Correspondent

CUDDALORE, FEB. 23. The work on the Rs. 125-crore Indian Tsunami Early Warning System is underway and is expected to be completed by September 2007, according to Harsh K. Gupta, Secretary, Department of Ocean Development (DOD), Government of India.

Mr. Gupta said the system would be far better than the one existing in the Pacific region in terms of forecasting tsunami and storm surges in the Indian Ocean. He was speaking at the seventh convention of the Mineralogical Society of India at Annamalai University, Chidambaram, on Wednesday.

For want of buoys, 70 per cent of the Pacific forecast on tsunami turned out to be false, but the Indian system would address the issue in an effective manner. The DOD would implement the project through its institutions — INCOIS, NIOT and the ICMAM.

Genesis

About the genesis of tsunami, the Secretary said it occurred whenever there was a large-scale disturbance of the seabed, mostly due to earthquakes or volcanic eruptions or submarine landslides. It would propagate waves at high speed ranging from 500 to 1,000 km per hour. The waves would be just less than a metre in the deep ocean but would grow to tens of metres in the shoreline.

The system was imperative for the Indian Ocean to mitigate loss of life and property due to tsunamis and storm surges. Its design would be based on end-to-end principle encompassing the near-real time determination of earthquake parameters in the two known tsunamigenic zones of the Indian Ocean region — the Andaman and Nicobar Islands to Java and Sumatra, and, the Makaran coast — using the land-based seismic stations.

The project envisaged establishing a comprehensive real time ocean observational network comprising the bottom pressure recorders around these two zones, tide gauges and radar-based coastal monitoring stations. The tsunamigenic areas capable of producing earthquake of the magnitude 7 and above that could generate tsunami to hit the Indian coasts were well known.

Network of stations

He suggested setting up of a dedicated network of six to eight seismic stations spread across the country such as Port Blair, Hyderabad, Chennai, Visakhapatnam, Delhi, Shillong and Bhuj. Necessary software could be developed to do this automatically by networking these stations. He also propounded deployment of about a dozen DART (Deep ocean assessment and reporting of tsunami) buoys at suitable locations that could detect and alert the movement of tsunami.

With the data available from the bathymetric surveys, the travel time from the known location of seismogenic earthquakes to various areas in the Indian coasts could be worked out.

For executing the project, nine work packages or modules had been prepared that included numeric modelling for tsunami genesis; wave propagation and interaction with landmass; generation of coastal inundation maps and vulnerability maps for coastal villages; and capacity building, education and training for all stakeholders.

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