By DIANA LEONARD/The Washington Post
The United States’ tsunami system is in need of a major update, with ongoing problems that include outdated software, delayed alerts and poor communication to the public, according to a panel of tsunami experts.
Its recent report sees “an urgent need for action” and advises the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to overhaul aspects of the system to fix these and other pressing issues.
Tsunamis are a series of very long ocean waves generally caused by undersea earthquakes or other events that disrupt a significant amount of ocean water. The U.S. West Coast, Hawaii and Alaska are particularly tsunami-prone, with potential threats found around the Pacific rim. At least 30 reported tsunamis have caused at least one death or $1 million in damage to the United States as of January 2018, according to NOAA.
As recently as January, tsunami waves reached the West Coast and advisories were issued across Hawaii, Alaska, Washington, Oregon and California, prompted by the underwater explosion of the Hunga Tonga volcano.
“Every tsunami is very tricky … we learn something new every time,” said Rick Wilson, co-chair of the Tsunami Science and Technology Advisory Panel, a group of nonfederal scientists that issued the report and an arm of the NOAA Science Advisory Board. “However, we feel that these recommendations going forward will not only save lives, but potentially millions of dollars in the future for commerce and protection of the coastline from tsunami hazards.”
The 32-page report outlines several areas for improvement, but the most pressing matters involve NOAA’s tsunami warning program and its two tsunami warning centers, located in Honolulu and Palmer, Alaska. Namely, the report points out “perceived gaps and inconsistencies throughout the tsunami forecast and warning process.” Some of the changes recommended are extensive and described as an “overhaul” to ensure accurate, timely and clear warnings of impending tsunami waves.
NAS assessment in 2011
This year’s report builds on a sweeping 2011 assessment by the National Academy of Sciences, which found numerous gaps in the nation’s tsunami preparedness and much room for improvement, detailed in a long list of recommendations spanning nearly 200 pages.
While progress has been made on a number of fronts, many key issues remain unaddressed or have not kept pace with changing technology, or new issues have emerged.
The panel looked closely at the overarching warning system: from the tsunami source to the forecast, to the messaging going out to the public.
“We found that parts of [the] system that they have in place right now are somewhat antiquated and are not capable of making changes that a lot of states and communities are requesting to be changed,” said Wilson.
For example, the two tsunami warning centers in Alaska and Hawaii are relying on outdated software and methods, which limits improving the warning process — including estimating wave-generating potential from earthquakes and other sources. As new and complicated warning issues have arisen over the years, patchwork or “band-aid” fixes have been applied.
The Hunga Tonga volcanic eruption and resulting tsunami Jan. 15 in the South Pacific exposed an issue that the panel had already identified — that NOAA should improve its ability to detect and warn about tsunamis from non-earthquake sources, such as volcanic eruptions and landslides.
For example, because the system is set up to estimate tsunamis generated by earthquakes, tsunami advisories were issued for Hawaii and the U.S. West Coast relatively late, Wilson said.
“Every day, year or 10 years that goes by makes it more likely that we are going to have a larger event that will really test the system,” said Corina Allen, chief hazards geologist at the Washington Geological Survey and a member of the panel.
What is needed, according to the report, is a “comprehensive, enterprise-wide technology upgrade” of the warning system.
For example, the panel’s co-chair, Rocky Lopes, suggested that the centers could have their alerting capability unified under the umbrella of the National Weather Service and brought into its advanced warning platform, which is used to issue timely alerts for all weather events. In analyzing earthquake events, the panel recommended greater collaboration with the U.S. Geological Survey, which uses more up-to-date earthquake analysis software than is available at the warning centers.
Not communicating well
NOAA’s two tsunami warning centers cover two separate regions. The National Tsunami Warning Center serves Alaska, Canada and the contiguous United States, while the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center covers the Hawaiian Islands, U.S. and British territories in the Caribbean and Pacific, and international coastlines in the Caribbean and the Pacific.
A long-standing problem is that the two centers are not coordinated and do not speak with one voice. It is also difficult for one center to step in and perform the duties of the other if one center is temporarily out of service.
“The warning centers have very capable people and really good scientists, but they operate independently,” said Lopes, a former administrator of the National Tsunami Hazard Mitigation Program.
As a result, they may interpret the same event differently or offer different products to their respective regions. For example, the NTWC provides estimated wave heights to Alaska and the West Coast, which states and communities have found valuable for response efforts and to better gauge tsunami hazards. The PTWC, however, does not provide this information to its service areas.
The website that serves as the official warning depot for all tsunami events — Tsunami.gov — was established in 2016 and collects warning information from each center in bulletins in near real-time. But when a large earthquake happens, the nature and reach of any potential tsunami threat is far from clear.
“It is not a user-friendly website,” said Allen of the Washington Geological Survey. “If you are going there for the first time to try to track these bulletins, it is really confusing.”
According to the report, an overall update to the Tsunami.gov website is needed, and it could provide a single national message to summarize the scope of each event. Lopes indicated that the lack of attention to Tsunami.gov is probably because of insufficient staffing, which the panel hopes NOAA will address in its response to the report.
Evacuations need time
The warning centers issue initial alerts about possible tsunamis within five minutes of an earthquake, but it can take up to three hours to produce a full forecast with estimated wave heights for coastal areas farther from the wave source. That’s a problem for coastal emergency managers who need to make important evacuation decisions quickly.
“What we found is that a lot of emergency managers still need about three or four hours at a minimum to pull off their evacuations and their response activities,” said Wilson of Tsunami Science and Technology Advisory Panel.
On July 28, 2021, following a magnitude-8.2 earthquake off the coast of Alaska, the threat to the West Coast was listed for several hours as “being evaluated,” leaving little time to initiate evacuation plans if they had been needed.
The panel recommends that NOAA provide some estimate of likely impacts to states much earlier. It also points to newer technologies that may quickly detect tsunamis in the open ocean, such as global navigation satellite systems, which could help to speed up the warning process and may be more cost effective than the network of ocean buoys currently used.
The NOAA administrator has one year from January, when the report was received, to respond to the recommended changes.