Sea Level Station Metadata for Tsunami Detection, Warning and Research
Abstract
The devastating earthquake and tsunami of December 26, 2004 has greatly increased recognition of the need for water level data both from the coasts and the deep-ocean. In 2006, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) completed a Tsunami Data Management Report describing the management of data required to minimize the impact of tsunamis in the United States. One of the major gaps defined in this report is the access to global coastal water level data. NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) and National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) are working cooperatively to bridge this gap. NOAA relies on a network of global data, acquired and processed in real-time to support tsunami detection and warning, as well as high-quality global databases of archived data to support research and advanced scientific modeling. In 2005, parties interested in enhancing the access and use of sea level station data united under the NOAA NCDC's Integrated Data and Environmental Applications (IDEA) Center's Pacific Region Integrated Data Enterprise (PRIDE) program to develop a distributed metadata system describing sea level stations (Kari et. al., 2006; Marra et.al., in press). This effort started with pilot activities in a regional framework and is targeted at tsunami detection and warning systems being developed by various agencies. It includes development of the components of a prototype sea level station metadata web service and accompanying Google Earth-based client application, which use an XML-based schema to expose, at a minimum, information in the NOAA National Weather Service (NWS) Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC) station database needed to use the PTWC's Tide Tool application. As identified in the Tsunami Data Management Report, the need also exists for long-term retention of the sea level station data. NOAA envisions that the retrospective water level data and metadata will also be available through web services, using an XML-based schema. Five high-priority metadata requirements identified at a water level workshop held at the XXIV IUGG Meeting in Perugia will be addressed: consistent, validated, and well defined numbers (e.g. amplitude); exact location of sea level stations; a complete record of sea level data stored in the archive; identifying high-priority sea level stations; and consistent definitions. NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) and co-located World Data Center for Solid Earth Geophysics (including tsunamis) would hold the archive of the sea level station data and distribute the standard metadata. Currently, NGDC is also archiving and distributing the DART buoy deep-ocean water level data and metadata in standards based formats. Kari, Uday S., John J. Marra, Stuart A. Weinstein, 2006 A Tsunami Focused Data Sharing Framework For Integration of Databases that Describe Water Level Station Specifications. AGU Fall Meeting, 2006. San Francisco, California. Marra, John, J., Uday S. Kari, and Stuart A. Weinstein (in press). A Tsunami Detection and Warning-focused Sea Level Station Metadata Web Service. IUGG XXIV, July 2-13, 2007. Perugia, Italy.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2007
- Bibcode:
- 2007AGUFMIN51B0400S
- Keywords:
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- 0525 Data management;
- 0530 Data presentation and visualization;
- 3050 Ocean observatories and experiments;
- 4564 Tsunamis and storm surges