National Geophysical Data Center Tsunami Data Archive

NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) and co-located World Data Center for Geophysics and Marine Geology long-term tsunami data archive provides data and derived products essential for tsunami hazard assessment, forecast and warning, inundation modeling, preparedness, mitigation, education, and research. As a result of NOAA's efforts to strengthen its tsunami activities, the long-term tsunami data archive has grown from less than 5 gigabyte in 2004 to more than 2 terabytes in 2008. The types of data archived for tsunami research and operation activities have also expanded in fulfillment of the P.L. 109-424. The archive now consists of: global historical tsunami, significant earthquake and significant volcanic eruptions database; global tsunami deposits and proxies database; reference database; damage photos; coastal water-level data (i.e. digital tide gauge data and marigrams on microfiche); bottom pressure recorder (BPR) data as collected by Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis (DART) buoys. The tsunami data archive comes from a wide variety of data providers and sources. These include the NOAA Tsunami Warning Centers, NOAA National Data Buoy Center, NOAA National Ocean Service, IOC/NOAA International Tsunami Information Center, NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, U.S. Geological Survey, tsunami catalogs, reconnaissance reports, journal articles, newspaper articles, internet web pages, and email. NGDC has been active in the management of some of these data for more than 50 years while other data management efforts are more recent. These data are openly available, either directly on-line or by contacting NGDC. All of the NGDC tsunami and related databases are stored in a relational database management system. These data are accessible over the Web as tables, reports, and interactive maps. The maps provide integrated web-based GIS access to individual GIS layers including tsunami sources, tsunami effects, significant earthquakes, significant volcano events, and various spatial reference layers such as topography, population density, and political boundaries. The map service also provides ftp links and hyperlinks to additional hazards information such as the NGDC collection of hazards photos. The NGDC website also provides a Keyhole Markup Language (KML) file, updated nightly, containing tsunami sources and runups