In addition to the event location and magnitude information described in my previous post, subsequent PTWC bulletins for a particular event also list actual or predicted time and location of impact, and wave heights at specific locations.This is the potentially life-saving information everyone near a coast wants to know after a tsunami warning has been issued: will it hit me, and when?

Locations listed in PTWC bulletins for the southern Sumatra undersea earthquakes last week, for example, include both places (“Padang, Indonesia” in the table below) and ocean monitoring buoys in the region (“DART 23401″ in the table below).

GAUGE LOCATION LAT LON TIME AMPL PER
PADANG IDA 0.9S 100.4E 1348Z 0.98M / 3.2FT 34MIN
DART 23401 8.9S 88.5E 1421Z 0.02M / 0.1FT 15MIN

You can enter or cut-and-paste the latitude and longitude for a place or buoy into Google Earth‘s “Fly To” box. The coordinates “8.9 N 88.5 E” are the location of Deep-Ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis (DART) buoy 23401, maintained by the Thailand Meteorological Department in the Indian Ocean. This is a global list of buoys.

Indonesia is still struggling to acquire, deploy and maintain buoys off its seismically-active west coast, as this map of current DART buoys regrettably shows. The Asean Earthquake Information Center in Jakarta is a regional information-sharing network that partially compensates for Indonesia’s handicap.  Read more... (285 words, 0 images, estimated 1:08 mins reading time)

UNESCO‘s International Tsunami Information Centre offers tsunami warnings by email from 31 seismic stations and 79 tidal stations around the Pacific. Sign up at this link. It’s a bit jarring to get an email with the subject “tsunami warning”, but nice to know it works. Hosted by the U.S. National Weather Center‘s Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre, the system is administered by the ITSU/Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission. These are the member states. Note: there’s also a warning system for the Indian Ocean and for the Atlantic/Mediterranean.

The United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction and the Belgian Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters report that 360 natural disasters in 2005 (an average of one each day) caused US$160 billion in damage; Hurricane Katrina damage was 78% ($125 billion) of that amount. This is the summary: more people were affected by more disasters, but there were fewer deaths. Here are the report’s graphics.