Reducing cost while increasing the resilience effectiveness of tsunami early warning systems

Tsunamis continue to present a major hazard in the Indo-Pacific / Ring of Fire region, as well as many nations with large populations living in coastal and low-lying areas. The continued hazard that tsunamis and related phenomena present was emphasised in the second half of 2018 when three separate tsunamis struck Indonesia (twice) and New Caledonia and Vanuatu. Each of these events highlighted different difficulties in providing effective early warning of tsunamis, in particular each featured a failure of either: (1) tsunami/wave detection; (2) warning dissemination; or (3) accurate and rapid appraisal of a detected event, so that a warning could be issued for dissemination. In this paper we describe our work to date on solving these three problems, building on our past work in this space. For warning dissemination we describe the proposed low-cost Emergency Telecommunications Cluster (ETC) Lali warning dissemination system. For event detection we describe a concept for low-cost (including maintenance) tsunami detection networks, utilising advances in low-cost autonomous underwater vehicles. For rapid event evaluation and warning release, we describe the planned ETC Lali Control Portal. Together, these three related innovations have the potential to transform not only tsunami early warning, but also the provision of early warning to a variety of other hazards, thus providing a path towards the reduction of human, social and economic harm that these events cause, and thus hopefully improving the prosperity and resilience of coastal and island communities around the world.