New Delhi
11 October 2005
Nine months after the December 26, 2004 earthquake-triggerred
tsunami, India finally has a tsunami travel time atlas in place. It is the most basic and
most important information required by a tsunami warning system, which is being set up
by the nations around the Indian Ocean Rim.
Prepared by experts from the Indian Institutes of Technology in Kharagpur and Delhi,
University of Ottawa in Canada and the University of Massachussets in the United
States, the atlas is the first of its kind for India and also for the Indian Ocean. (There is
already such an atlas for the Pacific Ocean.)
The team comprised B Prasad Kumar, R Rajesh Kumar and SK Dube from the
Department of Ocean Engineering & Naval Architecture, IIT-Kharagpur; Tad Murty from
the Department of Civil Engineering, University of Ottawa, Canada; Avijit Gangopadhyay
and Ayan Chaudhuri from the School of Marine Science & Technology of the University of
Massachussets at Dartmouth, USA; and AD Rao from the Centre for Atmospheric
Sciences, IIT-Delhi.
The atlas provides the ETA or expected time of arrival of the first wave of the tsunami at
various selected coastal locations around the rim of the ocean. The warning centre
advises the civil defence people about possible evacuation, if needed, based upon the
travel times of the tsunami waves at a given location.
"Without this most basic information, the tsunami warning centre cannot advise
governments what action to take, if any, in case of real tsunami events," Dr Tad Murty
told this correspondent. "The atlas which we have prepared will be useful for all the
countries, about 37, who have a coastline in the Indian Ocean."
The team selected 250 locations extending from the Australian continent to the Cape of
Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa including countries around the Persian Gulf and
the Red Sea. They included three locations each in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Iran, 15 in
Sri Lanka and nine in Myanmar.
Dr Murty added that advanced knowledge of travel times for the first wave provides
some additional valuable time for evacuation of people, if and when evacuation is
needed. For the Pacific Ocean, it has been shown that the travel time charts are accurate
to plus or minus one minute, for each hour of travel.
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