A seminar by Otago Geology PhD students Luce Lacoua and Emeline Wavelet.

With more than 75% of New Zealanders living or working within 10 kilometres of the coast, our tsunami risk is significant.

To reduce the risk of tsunami disaster, New Zealand is currently improving its Tsunami Early Warning procedures, with the aim of providing generational change of the system to one that delivers time-dependent tsunami forecasts in a shorter time.

To improve the rapid characterisation of large earthquakes occurring in New Zealand and in the Southwest Pacific, we seek to implement a regional W phase inversion algorithm at a regional scale and optimize its calculation time to 10–15 minutes (against the current 40 minutes) to meet global UNESCO targets. These earthquake parameters are then implemented in an ensemble forecast model, which is the crucial advance that facilitates time-dependent warnings.

In this 2 part talk, we will present ongoing work to implement improved operational W phase inversion and then to take the outcomes of ensemble forecasting to develop time-dependent tsunami warning products.

Streaming information

Zoom link: https://bit.ly/otagogeology