Can SMART cables—a real-time, deep-ocean sensor network—improve tsunami-hazard assessment? Yes!
Abstract
The necessary replacement of outdated undersea telecommunication cables provides us with a golden opportunity to greatly improve many areas of climate, oceanographic, and geophysical research, and to greatly improve tsunami-warning capabilities. Over the next two decades the vast majority of the world's ocean-crossing undersea telecommunication cables will age into obsolescence and will not be able to provide the bandwidth required to address the ever-increasing demand for transporting vast amounts of information. Since 2012 the United Nations ITU/WMO/IOC Joint Task Force has led the Science Monitoring and Reliable Telecommunications (SMART) cables research/public/private sector initiative, and it will be one of the transformative technologies for the 2021-2030 UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development. Each SMART cable will contain regularly-spaced instrument packages along its length that includes a pressure sensor, an accelerometer, and a temperature sensor. The cables will carry the power and communications needed to operate these instruments and obtain their data in real-time.
Our presentation will focus on the improvements possible for the world's tsunami warning systems. SMART cables can improve rapid seismic location and magnitude estimation, as well tsunami detection and monitoring. We will show that just the deployment of a few SMART cables with 500km instrument package spacing along existing cable routes can reduce earthquake location and tsunami detection times by 25%. Currently there are 70 or so deep ocean pressure gauges in use whose data is publicly available. The addition of a few SMART cables with an instrument package spacing of 100km would increase the amount of deep ocean pressure sensors well into the hundreds. The data supplied by SMART cables would allow tsunami warning centers to more quickly validate and improve tsunami forecasts. SMART cable data will also greatly aid in the detection of tsunamis generated by or coupled with non-tectonic events such as landslides. We will present the results of numerical calculations that show how SMART cables can improve the world's tsunami warning systems.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFMNH33A..07W
- Keywords:
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- 4315 Monitoring;
- forecasting;
- prediction;
- NATURAL HAZARDS;
- 4333 Disaster risk analysis and assessment;
- NATURAL HAZARDS;
- 4341 Early warning systems;
- NATURAL HAZARDS;
- 4564 Tsunamis and storm surges;
- OCEANOGRAPHY: PHYSICAL