Tsunami research stresses forecasts

SEATTLE – Tsunami research was always a small field with relatively few research dollars until last December when the South Asia tsunami killed at least 200,000 people.

Now scientists have stepped up their forecasting work, with researchers in the Pacific Northwest developing tsunami models for American coastal communities, and the federal government supplying the dollars to make that happen.

Because the Pacific Northwest is as much at risk from a major tsunami as communities in Asia, scientists are focusing on what to do when, not if, it happens here.

Mathematical modelers and software experts are working together to analyze the complex data that determines tsunami behavior. They want to create simulations that can predict if a deep-sea quake will produce a tsunami, how big it will be and how will it impact coastal communities.

“The idea is to pre-compute a lot of the information so we can do it in minutes instead of hours,” said Diego Arcas, a forecaster for the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Seattle station, told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Arcas said modelers still need several months to gather all the information needed to create an accurate computer model and then another four to five hours to run the computer simulations for a specific tsunami.

“That’s not going to help very many people,” Arcas said. “We are trying to get (the runs) down to less than 10 minutes.”

The scientists at the Seattle NOAA lab have so far been able to accurately create tsunami simulations that can be run in minutes for nine communities: San Francisco and Crescent City, Calif.; Hilo, Hawaii; Kodiak, Alaska; Newport and Seaside, Ore.; and Neah Bay, Willapa Bay and Port Angeles. They are working on 66 other coastal communities.

Working with a team of engineers led by Chris Meinig at the Seattle NOAA lab, Gonzalez, lab director Eddie Bernard and their scientific colleagues developed the system of satellite-linked buoys and sea floor detectors now used to warn of tsunamis in the Pacific Ocean.

The Indian Ocean tsunami of Dec. 26, 2004 which struck the coastlines of 11 countries, came without warning. The distant seismologists who saw the initial data spawned by the earthquake off the coast of Sumatra failed to immediately assess its size.

Seismic detectors failed to register the true magnitude, the “mega-thrust” magnitude 9 quake, of the gigantic tremor on the sea floor.

Gonzalez and his team at the NOAA lab in Seattle have been struggling for years to fix this problem, to create a system that works in real time, detecting midocean tsunamis directly and rapidly forecasting their paths of destruction in minutes.

After Dec. 26, Congress authorized spending $40 million to greatly expand the DART network from today’s seven buoys to nearly 40 to be deployed throughout the Pacific, Atlantic and Caribbean by the end of 2007.

It’s still not enough money to do what’s needed, but it’s a start, the experts say.