Preparation for the installation of a Tsunami Early Warning System in Indonesia

In four month - on November 11 - the German Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System will be officially inaugurated in Jakarta. Therefore DLR conducted a workshop with Indonesian partners to prepare for the deployment and installation of the newly developed Tsunami Decision Support System (DSS). The workshop took place at the German Remote Sensing Data Center (DFD) in Oberpfaffenhofen for elaborating and fine-tuning the last system details and organizational issues.

The workshop took place just before installation and commissioning of the final hard- and software in the future Earthquake Information and Tsunami Warning Center at the National Geophysical and Meteorological Agency (BMG) in Jakarta. Presentations and discussions comprised the current and planned status of sensor information flows, information acquisition and aggregation in the Tsunami Early Warning DSS. Furthermore the future responsibilities of individual components, institutions and authorities during and after the Test and Commissioning Phase were planned. This workshop was an important step towards an innovative Tsunami Early warning system which will become operational after successful completion of the test and commissioning phase in mid 2009.

The partners also discussed about ways in which warning messages will be disseminated from the warning centre to regional and local recipients. Future ways to integrate additional risk and vulnerability information as well as geospatial information into the system for aiding in the decision making process were demonstrated.

Parallel to the DLR-BMG workshop, the tsunami modelling group at Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) has deployed its simulation system (SIM) on DLR hardware and connected it with the DSS. The simulation system determines potential tsunami propagation and its impact on land within seconds, using mathematical simulation approaches. The results are based on simultaneous analysis of incoming data from seismometers, wave gauges and GPS sensors, which measure earth crust deformation.

The "German-Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System" (GITEWS) is a contribution on the part of the German government to rebuilding the infrastructures in the region of the Indian Ocean. The project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Educational Research (BMBF).