Researchers from Hannover
Extend Tsunami Early Warning System in Indonesia

The Federal Ministry of Education and Research is Funding the Project of
Leibniz Universität Hannover with Roughly 1.2 Million Euros

Under the direction of the Franzius Institute of Hydraulic, Waterways and Coastal Engineering of Leibniz Universität Hannover an interdisciplinary joint project is researching into the further development of the tsunami early warning system in the Indian Ocean on the basis of detailed flooding and evacuation simulations for the city of Padang in West Sumatra, Indonesia. For this the experts from Hannover around Prof. Torsten Schlurmann are working together with leading scientists from the whole of Germany as well as with Indonesian partners. The Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is funding the three-year project with roughly 1.2 million euros.

The city of Padang with a population of roughly one million is a third largest city in Sumatra, and because of its direct location at sea level on the coast it is a high-risk zone in a region threatened by earthquakes and by tsunamis. Along the whole of the west coast of Sumatra the tsunami can reach the towns near the coast in roughly 18 to 20 minutes. The “Last-mile Evacuation” project is, with the aid of scientific knowledge of the detailed flooding dynamics and optimum early-warning and evacuation mechanisms in Padang, to make a contribution to the large project also funded by BMBF for the construction of a tsunami early-warning system in the Indian Ocean (GITEWS), which is under the direction of the Geo-Research Centre in Potsdam.

For the “Last-mile Evacuation” the scientists of the joint interdisciplinary research group combine satellite observation data, simulations of the flooding dynamics as well as the presumed evacuation behaviour of the population. A “visualised, artificial world” of the city of Padang is thus produced with the aid of the data. In addition, in one part of the project an area of 500 square kilometres is flown over with a stereo camera system, and here the height of the land and also individual buildings can be recorded extremely precisely. The researchers want to simulate the flow of traffic in large parts of the road network in the case of an evacuation.

The goal of the project is the integral and effective determination of the tsunami early-warning system in the city of Padang. This goal is based on the components of the detection of the tsunami in deep water as well as on the processing of the data and setting off alarms in the Central Indonesian Crisis and Information Centre, and thus provides a locally adapted warning system in Padang. Finally, the evacuation mechanisms and the subsequent recommendations for the evacuation in Padang are to be made available. Problems in the evacuation (so-called “bottlenecks”) are to be recognised and - as far as possible – removed through the simulation of the traffic flows. Since the disastrous tsunami on December 26th, 2004 scientists from Indonesian and German research institutes have been working on the establishment of a reliable deepwater early-warning system with GPS buoys and pressure sensors on the ocean floor, which should be able to start work as a prototype off the Indonesian coast at the end of the coming year.

The joint project “Last-mile Evacuation” includes local authorities and non-government organisations in Padang as well as Indonesian research institutions. In addition, cooperation with the Society for Technical Cooperation (GTZ) is planned in the region. In Germany, among others, the Institute for Environment and Human Security of the United Nations University (UNU - EHS), the University of Würzburg, the Technical University Berlin, the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) as well as small and medium-sized businesses are participating.

Meldung vom 27.06.2007