Could a network of Tsunami Wave sensors help with last minute warnings ?
These would be solar powered buoys anchored to the sea floor, when they rise further than expected they can send a radio transmission indicating height data.
or do they already have things like that ?
Tau.Neutrino said:
Could a network of Tsunami Wave sensors help with last minute warnings ?These would be solar powered buoys anchored to the sea floor, when they rise further than expected they can send a radio transmission indicating height data.
or do they already have things like that ?
The Indonesians had them, but through neglect they were not working.
Make the Tsunami Wave buoy devices last for fifty years.
That might help.
Could a laser beam detect a high wave ?
Tau.Neutrino said:
Could a laser beam detect a high wave ?
They would be limited by curvature of the earth.
Tau.Neutrino said:
Could a network of Tsunami Wave sensors help with last minute warnings ?These would be solar powered buoys anchored to the sea floor, when they rise further than expected they can send a radio transmission indicating height data.
or do they already have things like that ?
They already have things like that. Australia has a good collection, as do many other countries.
IIRC Tsunami sensors are pressure sensors on the seafloor.
Australia put in more sensors after the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, because at that time our only Indian Ocean sensor was at Christmas Island.
They are extremely useful for distant tsunamis, say when an earthquake in Japan or Alaska causes a tsunami in Hawaii or Chile – it has happened. But haven’t been any use so far when the tsunami is very close to where the earthquake occurs, because the network is not fine enough to have a sensor everywhere.
The above is from memory. Let’s see what I can find on the web.
http://www.bom.gov.au/tsunami/about/detection_buoys.shtml
https://nctr.pmel.noaa.gov/Dart/
I notice with startlement that there is absolutely nothing there to protect Australia’s east coast south of the Great Barrier Reef. The ridge north of new Zealand is extremely seismically active, and an undersea avalanche there is the main tsunami threat to eastern Australia – but there are no sensors in the area.
Tau.Neutrino said:
Could a laser beam detect a high wave ?
LIDAR and Radar from space can – for normal ocean waves. The TOPEX-POSEIDON mission was the first to use radar to measure ocean wave heights and wave direction. There have been better spacecraft since then, using LIDAR as well as radar. But in deep water, a deadly tsunami may be only about 10 cm high. It increases in height to tens of metres only on approaching the shore. I’ve heard of satellites photographing tsunamis as they approach the shore, but these images are generally not available fast enough.
The above is from memory, now checking the web.
This is from 2005, the tsunami wave height was captured by satellite radar for the 2004 boxing day tsunami in the Indian Ocean.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6854-radar-satellites-capture-tsunami-wave-height/
The US-French satellites, called TOPEX/Poseidon and Jason-1, passed over the Bay of Bengal two hours after the massive earthquake struck just off the coast of Indonesia.
That is “just about the time the leading edge of the tsunami was hitting Sri Lanka and India”, says Lee-Lueng Fu, project scientist for the satellites at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, US.
The satellites did not observe coastal areas. But for eight minutes, they used radar to measure the sea level along a 3000-kilometre-long track of ocean.
But when it comes down to it, all they saw was the graph at the bottom of the following image. The satellite track is the black line in the top image shown superposed on the computer model, traversed from north (Bay of Bengal) to south. On the graph at the bottom, the blue is the computer model of the tsunami and the black is the satellite observation of sea surface height.
