German-Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System (GITEWS) is on a good track
Within the frame of today’s International Steering Committee Meeting of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Indonesian State Ministry of Research and Technology (RISTEK) the newly developed Decision Support System (DSS) was presented. The DSS is designed and implemented under the management of the German Remote Sensing Data Center (DFD) of DLR. The meeting of this committee took place on November 6 and 7, 2007 at DFD in Oberpfaffenhofen.
The DSS is a core component of the German-Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System. Within the DSS all results from different sensor systems are combined, updated and used in combination with geospatial data sets, including pre-calculated tsunami modelling and risk analysis results in coastal areas, for a general situation assessment. This situation assessment will be used by decision makers in the warning center to evaluate the potential occurrence of a tsunami, including estimated arrival time and wave height at the coastline.
The successful demonstration of the interaction between the DSS prototype, the earthquake monitoring system “SeisComP3” of the GeoForschungszentrum Potsdam (GFZ) and the Tsunami Simulation System of the Alfred-Wegener-Institute Bremerhaven (AWI) marks a major milestone on the way to an operational Tsunami Early Warning System for Indonesia.
The generation of warning messages and additional crisis information products will be part of the complete warning system.