New system to give near-immediate tsunami warnings

The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta   |  Tue, 11/11/2008 12:55 PM  |  National

The recently launched Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System (InaTEWS) would signal warnings five minutes after a tsunami- potential earthquake occurred, the government's Meteorology and Geophysics Agency (BMG) says.

"We're not far behind Japan. Through intensive development over a short period we have produced a system that can detect tsunamis within five minutes after a quake," BMG chairman Sri Wowo B. Harijono said at the official InaTEWS launch in Jakarta on Tuesday.

The Japanese system, Harijono said, can detect a tsunami within two minutes of an earthquake.

"But this was only developed after 53 years of research and development," he said, as quoted by Antara.

InaTEWS is a comprehensive early warning system that uses Decision Support System (DSS) technology -- an interactive software-based system intended to help decision makers compile useful information from raw data, documents, personal knowledge and/or business models, to identify and solve problems and make decisions.

InaTEWS is the brainchild of 18 governmental institutions and five donor countries: Germany, Japan, China, the United States and France.

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