Updated 5 July 2013, 9:39 AEST
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre will no longer issue blanket warnings and watch alerts after earthquakes that could potentially cause a tsunami.
Instead, information about wave sizes will be made available, allowing individual governments to decide whether coastlines need to be evacuated.
Interviewer: Brendan Arrow
Stuart Weinstein, deputy director, Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre
WEINSTEIN: One of the benefits will be is that under our current criteria, which are conservative, typically what happens is the amount of area that we put in the Pacific basin that we put in a warning for an earthquake that has, let's say a magnitude great than 7.5, what would happen is the amount of area of the Pacific that we would put in a warning would probably be much larger than it needs to be. Because we operating on the basis of very conservative criteria and what we were stating was that is if your within three hours of the tsunami travel time of the earthquake when we issue that bulletin than you're going to be placed in a warning. But now that we have the ability to generate fast estimate about what the tsunami amplitude is going to be we can scale back on that. We can now say that with in that region, only certain coast lines need to worry about a tsunami hazard. And so the benefit is there will be less over warning. Under the current criteria there's always the problem that more coast line is probably getting evacuated than really needs to. Once the new products become operational the amount of over warning or unnecessary evacuation should decrease and I think that is an important benefit.
ARROW: And then it is up to individual countries to decide what action they take?
WEINSTEIN: That's exactly right. So in an effort to more or less respect the
decisions of individual countries one of the things we are going to do is remove this warning terminology out of our bulletins to stress we are not evacuating country's coast lines. It's really up to those authorities to use our analysis, as well as any analysis they may be doing, and come up with an informed decision as to what action they take along their coast line.
ARROW: Some countries have indicated they're not ready to issue their own tsunami warnings. What will these countries do when the changes come in?
WEINSTEIN: We are conducting training meetings so that they all get up to speed on what the new products are. And so they understand for example if there is a forecast that indicating that their coast lines are likely to be struck by a tsunami that's one metre in amplitude or greater, than that is something that posses a hazard to their coast line and they should take the appropriate action. So this is an on going process. These new products are being issued to our partners in the tsunami warning system in the Pacific. We will be doing this on a trial basis for a year and hopefully during this year we get a fair bit of feedback and then when we decided to really make these new products operational everyone is on board and everyone understand how to interpret the information in these bulletins.
Source: http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/international/radio/program/pacific-beat/pacific-tsunami-alerts-focus-on-accurate-information/1156498Check out http://groups.yahoo.com/group/californiadisasters/
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