A New Approach for a Tsunami Early Warning System Based on Maritime Wireless Communication, Case Study, Pangandaran, Indonesia

Abstract

Indonesia, located in the zone of “Ring of Fire,” has a high tsunami risk, specifically from those induced by earthquakes. The 2004 Aceh Tsunami and the 2006 Pangandaran Tsunami demonstrated that tsunamis could cause major damage to coastal areas. The Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System (Ina-TEWS) typically relies on buoys connected to satellites, transmitting information about 5 minutes after the tsunami earthquake begins. Though Indonesia relies on this system, many buoys have gone missing, emphasizing the need for a faster and more reliable backup early warning system. This study proposes a new early warning system by integrating maritime wireless communication between vessels in the open sea and coastal radio stations in the Pangandaran coastal area by using VHF and HF radio communication systems. 200 Gross Tonnage (GT) fishing vessels equipped with the VHF radio communication system are used for the first signal propagation option. The HF radio communication system is applied as a second option, for when there is a hop number limit. Three scenarios of tsunami numerical modeling were carried out using Delft3D and Delft Dashboard based on the earthquake and fault parameters from PUSGEN. The output from this study is the propagation time of VHF and HF signals of the early warning system for each scenario, which was less than 1 minute. The development of an early warning system based on maritime wireless communication is expected to be a part of Indonesia’s tsunami mitigation system in place of buoys.

Keywords

• tsunami
• delft3d
• maritime wireless communication
• vhf
• hf