HR: 14:30h
AN: U43C-04 INVITED     [Abstracts]
TI: To mitigate or not: Uncertainties in tsunami generation, impact, and warning
AU: * Kong, L S
EM: l.kong@unesco.org
AF: International Tsunami Information Centre, IOC of UNESCO, 737 Bishop St., Ste. 2200, Honolulu, HI 96813 United States
AB: As with earthquakes, tsunamis cannot be predicted. We do not know when the next tsunami will occur, where it will occur, and how high the tsunami wave might be. With little knowledge on the probabilities of these infrequent events causing significant damage, policy makers must decide where to place resources to develop costly, time-consuming inundation maps necessary for evacuating citizens, and whether to establish and maintain a data-dependent tsunami warning centre and alert system. As a result of the Indian Ocean tsunami catastrophe last December, governments and donors are spending over 150 million dollars to establish a tsunami warning and mitigation system, but it could be 50 or 100 years (or days) before the next destructive event occurs. Thanks to modern telecommunications, however, real-time monitoring of earthquakes allows scientists to very quickly assess the potential for a destructive tsunami. While this tsunamigenic potential is generally well-correlated with earthquake hypocenter and magnitude, uncertainty is removed only when a wave is confirmed through observation or instrument measurement. Improvements in wave forecasting through numerical modelling scaled with observed data are now providing opportunities for warning center scientists to provide estimates of wave impact, but the estimates can still err by 100 percent or more because of uncertainties in the tsunami source mechanism and wave behavior as it enters harbors and hits different coastlines. Emergency managers are thus faced with the difficult decision of whether to sound sirens and evacuate coastal communities without knowing if the wave will be damaging or not, a decision that could cost more than 50 million dollars in economic losses.
DE: 0800 EDUCATION
DE: 4564 Tsunamis and storm surges
DE: 6309 Decision making under uncertainty
SC: Union [U]
MN: Fall Meeting 2005