IIT-Kgp working on tsunami warning

Updated on: Monday, October 19, 2009

Kolkata: December 26, 2004, was not the first time that the world saw a killer tsunami surge and neither will it be the last.

According to experts at IIT, Kharagpur, the earliest tsunami records can be traced back to the time of Alexander. More recently, there was a tsunami surge in the Arabian Sea in 1945. A known phenomenon, it wouldn’t have caused such widespread devastation had there been greater awareness about it, feel experts at the premier tech school.

The institute, under the aegis of the union ministry of human resources development has tied up with the University of Massachussets, Dartmouth, and set up a Centre for Oceans, Rivers, Atmosphere and Land (CORAL) that will eventually build a Tsunami Warning System for the Indian Ocean. The idea is that, if a tsunami strikes again, the country will not be caught unawares. An oceanographer from the university, Avijit Gangopadhyay, who has studied tsunami patterns in the Pacific and will be guiding CORAL in this initiative.

“What is first needed is a traveltime atlas. This atlas will help one know how long it will take for the earthquake to travel from its epicentre in the ocean to a particular coastal location. Thus, the shock waves will not reach Port Blair and Chennai at the same time, for example. We will also try to predict the height of the waves at different coastal locations. Once these are known, many more lives can be saved and post-disaster operations planned,” said Gangopadhyay from Kharagpur.

The atlas will map the impact of tsunami shockwaves in 250 stations and at least 40 countries surrounding the ocean will benefit from it, informed Gangopadhyay. “Such studies have already been done for the Pacific for more than a 1000 stations and hence countries surrounding it are prepared to handle a tsunami much better,” he said.

But it is not just the tsunami that CORAL will look at. The projects will study other disasters like the Gujarat earthquake, Orissa cyclone and the 1978 floods. “Our aim is to try to mitigate post-hazard effects of earthquakes, floods and storm surges and see what evacuation strategies can be adopted. A large part of our study will focus on Bengal and the east coast because a large number of cyclones develop over the Bay of Bengal and have the potential to be extremely destructive. We will develop high resolution three dimensional cyclone, storm surge and wave forecasting models which will be used to forecast these disasters,” Gangopadhyay explained.

Work on building the first stages of the warning system will be over by the end of the year.

IIT-Kgp working on tsunami warning

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