A state-of-the-art National Tsunami Early Warning Centre, which has the capability to detect earthquakes of more than 6 magnitude in the Indian Ocean was inaugurated here on Monday by Union Minister for Science & Technology Kapil Sibal. He asked experts to improve the system and further reduce the time for disseminating information to the targeted people.

Lauding various agencies involved in establishing the Rs. 125-crore tsunami warning system without time and cost overruns, he said it was the most modern one in the world. It would now take 30 minutes to analyse the seismic data following an earthquake. The next task was to reduce the time to six to seven minutes, he said. The Centre was set up by the Ministry of Earth Sciences in the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS) here.

Mr. Sibal later announced that two more centres of excellence - Joint Marine Meteorological Organisation and Operational Oceanography - would be set up on the INCOIS campus after Chief Minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy instantly agreed to allot 10 acres to the institution.

He said a system was being put in place for collaborating with all neighbouring countries for sharing data. He said four Bottom Pressure Recorders (BPRs) were now deployed in the Bay of Bengal, two in the Arabian Sea and another six would be installed in five to six months. He stressed that technology must be used to provide information to the people through SMS in the local languages.

According to an INCOIS release, the warning system comprises a real-time network of seismic stations, BPRs and 30 tide gauges to detect tsunamigenic earthquakes and monitor tsunamis. The tsumanigenic zones that threaten the Indian Ocean were identified by considering past tsunamis, earthquakes, their magnitudes, and the location of the area relative to a fault and also by tsunami modelling.

The east and west coasts of India and the island regions are likely to be affected by tsunamis generated by earthquakes from two potential sources - the Andaman-Nicobar Sumatra island arc and the Makran subduction zone, north of the Arabian Sea.

Integrated Coastal and Marine Area Management (ICMAM) customised and ran the tsunami model for five ‘historical earthquakes’ and predicted inundation areas. The inundated areas are being overlaid on cadastral level maps of 1:5,000 scale. These community-level inundation maps are extremely useful for assessing the population and infrastructure at risk, the release added. Apart from Dr. Reddy, P.S. Goel, Secretary, Ministry of Earth Sciences, Peter Koltermann, Head, Tsunami Unit, Inter-governmental Oceanographic Commission, and Shailesh Nayak director, INCOIS, spoke.

Source