Global tsunami system sought
By Curtis Lum
Advertiser Staff Writer
The United States is spearheading an effort to link the thousands of data buoys in the world's oceans in an effort to improve and develop an early tsunami warning system, but the key will be to get individual nations to participate.
That's the challenge laid down by Conrad Lautenbacher, administrator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Lautenbacher was in Hawai'i yesterday to visit NOAA's Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in 'Ewa Beach.
Lautenbacher
Lautenbacher praised the center's staff for its response to the Indian Ocean earthquake and the devastating tsunami that followed. He said the center's staff followed procedures and got out a bulletin within 15 minutes that the earthquake did not generate a tsunami that would affect the Pacific Ocean.
But with no sensors in the Indian Ocean linked to the center, there was no way of determining whether a tsunami was generated there, he said.
Lautenbacher said nations need to pull together and create a system similar to the network of satellites that tracks the world's weather.
For more information on a proposed Global Earth Observation System of Systems, go to www.epa.gov/geoss
He said the Global Earth Observation System of Systems, proposed by the United States, would provide this vital link. The system would pull together data generated by "thousands of moored and free-floating data buoys ... thousands of land-based environmental stations and over 50 environmental satellites," a news release said.
The plan, which is supported by 53 countries, will be presented at the third Global Earth Observation summit Feb. 16 in Brussels, Belgium.
Lautenbacher said many countries, including Indian Ocean nations, have expressed interest in taking part in the system.
"There's the technological issue of hooking sensors together and then there's the political and international cooperation issue of getting countries to share data," Lautenbacher said. "That's what the GEOSS effort is about. It's trying to join these systems together technically as well as politically so nations will agree to both give warnings and accept warnings."
One of the major problems the Pacific Tsunami Center faced when the earth shook Dec. 26 was getting word to the affected countries, he said. The center's staff said they did not know whom to call because there was no communication protocol for such an event.
Lautenbacher defended the center's staff, which has been criticized for not doing enough to alert the 11 countries affected by the tsunami.
"It takes two people to make a warning work. You have to have a receptive audience on the other end," he said. "What we do is provide the front end. We broadcast it and the other side has to be set up to receive it. If they're not set up to receive it or do not have people on station to do that, then obviously the warning will not work."
But Doug Carlson, communications consultant who served as spokesman for Hawaiian Electric, said NOAA and the center relied too heavily on the Internet and e-mail to send the warnings. Carlson said the agencies should have contacted international media outlets, such as The Associated Press and CNN, to help get the word out.
"They did not do everything they could and should have. They had a responsibility as the world's leading authority on tsunami information and warning to do more," Carlson said. "If the message doesn't get through, the sender has failed."
U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, who heads the subcommittee that oversees NOAA, has called for hearings on NOAA's response to the disaster.
Reach Curtis Lum at 525-8025 or culum@honoluluadvertiser.com.
