Tsunami forecasting and warning in New Zealand
PMEL Seminar
Tuesday March 15 at 1:30PM
NOAA Sand Point Campus, Bldg 3, Room 2104
Tsunami forecasting and warning in New Zealand
Dr. William Power
GNS Science,New Zealand
New Zealand is a country susceptible to a wide range of tsunami threats. This talk presents the present arrangements in New Zealand for mitigation of these threats through forecasting and warning, and discusses plans for future improvements to these capabilities.
The first part of the talk will summarize the different types of tsunami sources that can cause dangerous tsunami in New Zealand: locally these include a variety of seismic, landslide and volcanic sources, and at regional and distant ranges consist mostly of subduction margin earthquakes from around the Pacific Rim.
For the purposes of warning about approaching distant and regional source tsunamis, the coastline has been divided into zones, and a threat-level is issued for each zone according to the severity of the anticipated tsunami. The decision regarding the appropriate threat-level is made after consideration of relevant sources of information and depends on the time and data available. Tools used to make this assessment include pre-calculated tsunami models, real-time inversion of DART buoy data (made possible with software developed by PMEL), and a historical tsunami database. Decisions on the appropriate response to a given threat-level are then made locally.
The main purpose of the talk is to summarize how the current arrangements are put into practice, and to focus on those areas that are most difficult and challenging with a view to initiating a discussion about how these challenges can be met in future.
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-- Lauren Koellermeier Outreach Coordinator NOAA/Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory 7600 Sand Point Way NE, Seattle, WA 98115 http://www.pmel.noaa.gov Phone: 206-526-6810 | FAX: 206-526-4576 Email: Lauren.Koellermeier@noaa.gov
