Indian tsunami warning centre to be ready by 2007

Kochi, Jul 20: Praising India for moving fast to set up a tsunami advance warning system in the wake of the December 2004 disaster, internationally renowned tsunami expert Tad S Murthy today said that the Indian tusnami warning system at Hyderabad is likely to be fully operational by September next year.

Talking to reporters here after inaugurating the 'Tsunami Cell' in the School of Marine Sciences of the Cochin University of Science and Technology (CUSAT), Prof. Murthy said that the 'Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Systems' (INCOIS), set up under the aegis of the union Department of Ocean Development (DoD) at Hyderabad, is to act as an interim tsunami warning centre.

Stating that the centre was already in a position to issue advance warnings for tsunami, Prof. Murthy said that it should be fully operational by September next year.

Tsunami buoys are to be placed at two places in the Arabian Sea and ten places in the Bay of Bengal as part of the system, he said.

''Among the 37 Indian Ocean countries, only India and Australia have made substantial progress in setting up tsunami warning systems. All the other countries are lagging behind,'' he said.

Prof. Murthy said that the Indian Ocean Protocol for regional cooperation on tsunami, being coordinated by the Inter-Governmental Oceonographic Commission (IOC), a part of UNESCO, was also likely to be in place by September next year.

''Once fully operational, the Indian system will be as good as the existing ones for the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans,'' he added.

Earlier, in his inaugural address at the opening of the 'Tsunami Cell', Prof. Murthy said that the biggest tsunami threat to India was from under-sea earthquakes in the Sumatra area and very little from the Java trench, which witnessed a tsunami recently.

There is also a minor threat from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and the Makran coast on the Iran-Pakistan border on the west coast, he said.

The Gulf of Kutch was the most vulnerable to a tsunami originating from the Makran coast while Tamil Nadu was most vulnerable on the east coast, followed by Andhra Pradesh, Orissa and West Bengal.

In reply to a question, he said that Mumbai seemed to be relatively safe from tsunamis as it had a ''natural protection'' as it was located in a tsunami ''shadow zone''. He also said that planting of coastal mangroves could reduce the wave amplitudes by as much as 50 to 60 per cent.

He said that Kerala could witness sea waves going as high as seven meters in case of a tsunami strike.

Commending CUSAT for its initiative to set up the 'Tsunami Cell', Prof. Murthy said that Kerala would need about 11 numerical models to base a tsunami warning system.

Describing numerical models as the heart of a good tsunami warning system, Prof. Murthy these, and not instruments such as buoys or tide gauges, were the key to a good warning system.

He said that the Indian Ocean, being ''elliptic'', was the most difficult to model as here ''reflected waves'' play a bigger role.

Earlier, Dr K T Damodaran, Director, School of Marine Sciences and chief coordinator, Tsunami Cell, said that the cell would initiate a multi-disciplinary research programme to prepare a ''vulnerability map'' of Kerala for tsunamis.

Also present on the occasion were CUSAT pro-vice chancellor N D Inasu and US tsunami expert Dr Karen O Loughlin.

UNI

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