Shipping vessels join tsunami watch

Ten Matson and Maersk Line ships will watch for tsunamis in the North Pacific under a novel system set up by University of Hawaii researchers.

The low-cost network will augment existing tsunami detection instruments, the university announced on its website last week.

Scientists from the UH- Manoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology worked in cooperation with Matson, Maersk and the World Ocean Council.

With real-time GPS and satellite communications, the ships can act as open-ocean tide gauges. Data from the sensors then can be streamed via satellite to a land-based center for processing and analysis.

“Matson was an obvious partner for this project due to their long history in Hawaii and shared interest in community safety and coastal hazards,” said James Foster, SOEST associate researcher and lead investigator for the project, in a statement. “The World Ocean Council’s unique connection within the industry allowed us to bring Maersk Line into the collaboration.”

The need for more tsunami detectors was underscored by the unexpectedly large March 2011 earthquake off Japan and another in 2012 at Canada’s Queen Charlotte Islands, Foster said.

Right now after an earthquake, scientists get information from coastal tide gauges and a series of deep-ocean DART buoys with seafloor sensors that can feel a tsunami pass overhead. But despite advances in monitoring and modeling, there has been too little data for sufficiently accurate predictions, the scientists said.

“Our approach offers a new, cost-effective way of acquiring many more observations to augment the current detection networks,” said co-investigator Todd Ericksen, SOEST assistant specialist.

By chance, in February 2010, Foster and colleagues were running an experiment aboard the UH research vessel R/V Kilo Moana when they detected the open-ocean tsunami generated by an 8.8-magnitude quake in Maule, Chile. That paved the way for the current project with support from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.