Regional Training Workshop on Pacific Tsunami Warning Center Enhanced Tsunami Products for ICG/CARIBE EWS

This four-day training workshop is being hosted by the Caribbean Tsunami Information Centre (CTIC) in association with UNESCO/IOC, the International Tsunami Information Center (ITIC), Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC), Caribbean Tsunami Warning Programme (CTWP) and the Coastal Zone Management Unit (CZMU), Barbados. The training targets 40 participants from 20 countries as well as regional organisations such as the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA), Caribbean Institute for Meteorology and Hydrology (CIMH), CTWP and the Puerto Rico Seismic Network (PRSN).

The workshop seeks to enable tsunami warning focal points (TWFPs), national tsunami warning centers (NTWC), and tsunami emergency responders (TERs) to effectively receive, analyse and take appropriate action in response to the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC) enhanced tsunami forecast products for the Caribbean and its adjacent regions. This training workshop covers tsunami warning operations and the use of the PTWC Enhanced Products for tsunami threat decision-making, with specific attention on the tsunami warning chain and their standard operating procedures (SOPs). Topics include warning and response SOPs and challenges, warning decision support tools, warning messages and alerting, evacuation concepts and planning, and awareness strategies.

Over the last 10+ years, with improvements in data quality, quantity, and real-time availability, PTWC’s response time has dropped significantly from an hour to 5-10 minutes for tsunami events. At the same time, with each great earthquake and tsunami since the 26 December 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami helping to increase scientific understanding, better techniques have been developed to quickly characterize the earthquake and numerically model the tsunami.

In the Pacific, the PTWS adopted use of the PTWC enhanced products based on numerical forecast models on 1 October 2014. For the Caribbean and adjacent regions, the changeover to PTWC’s new enhanced forecast products was approved by the ICG/CARIBE-EWS VIII (2013), introduced in CARIBE WAVE 2013, and since October 26, 2015, are being issued in parallel with the existing products. The changeover to solely the new products is planned to take place on 1 March 2016.