Hyderabad

India has agreed to share seismic data from four of its monitoring stations as part of a tsunami warning system for the Indian Ocean. But its offer has left many unimpressed.

The warning system will use a maze of deep ocean sensors and tide gauges surrounding the fault that ruptured on 26 December 2004. This earthquake triggered a tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people in 11 countries. But crucial to the network will be real-time seismic data from stations in the region.

India has been averse to sharing its seismic data in order to keep information about its underground nuclear tests a secret. “The only station that is available to the global seismic network has a delay of about three weeks before data are disseminated,” says Walter Mooney of the US Geological Survey, headquartered in Reston, Virginia.

India's offer, announced at the second meeting of the Intergovernmental Coordination Group (ICG) in Hyderabad last week, is limited to data on earthquakes with a magnitude of six and above, along the coast of Indonesia and Pakistan. Signals from nuclear tests would be much weaker than this. “For the purpose of tsunami warning we think our offer should be quite satisfactory,” India's science secretary Valangiman Ramamurthy told Nature.

Not everyone agrees, because of the time it would presumably take to filter the data. “A delay of even a minute in the dissemination of earthquake information could increase casualties,” says a report by an ICG working group released at the meeting. “We were pinning our hopes on real-time seismic signals from India,” adds Reinhold Ollig, head of a delegation from Germany that is helping Indonesia to build a national tsunami-warning centre in Jakarta. “Now we may have to upgrade a station in Sri Lanka for a real-time link.”

A tsunami early-warning network for the Indian Ocean should be in place by 2009. Credit: REUTERS/S. CRISP

The Indian offer, even though it is limited, is “a sign of progress”, Patricio Bernal, executive secretary of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, told Nature. He says Indian Ocean countries should be in a position to confirm the advance existence of a tsunami by September 2006, and that the fully fledged warning system is on track for completion by the end of 2008.

But as the first anniversary of the Asian tsunami approaches, there is concern at the news that the ICG has dropped the idea of one or two countries being responsible for issuing a warning across the region through the network. The ICG was worried that the proposal had “overly controlling connotations”, despite a similar system being in use at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii. Instead, the ICG suggests that the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission should accredit certain nations as ‘watch providers’ from whom, under bilateral agreements, other nations could obtain details of any events detected. It would then be up to individual nations to decide whether to issue a warning within their own territory. Indonesia, India, Thailand, Malaysia and Australia plan to have their national warning centres in operation before 2009.

Individual nations will be able to enter into bilateral arrangements with as many watch providers as they wish, which means that there will not be a single alert but several voices, depending on how many providers each nation ties up with. “There is going to be chaos,” warns K. Radhakrishnan, former director of the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services in Hyderabad.

Here, too, India is choosing its own path. It is investing US$30 million to upgrade its 70 seismic stations, deploying ten deep underwater pressure sensors and installing 50 satellite-linked tide gauges. It plans to have its warning centre running by September 2007 but says it will not subject itself to the ICG's accreditation process. “What India is doing is adequate for the entire Indian Ocean region,” says Ramamurthy. “If any country wants to work with us in tandem we have no problem.”