Testing Early Warning Systems

Before Aotearoa New Zealand adopts Earthquake Early Warning and Tsunami Early Warning systems, we need to review available technologies and test them for suitability in the New Zealand context.

We are assessing and testing a range of tsunami and earthquake early warning technologies against synthetic earthquakes to test their usefulness for Aotearoa New Zealand’s geography, population distribution, and emergency response systems.

Working closely with central government agencies and infrastructure managers, we will:

• quantify the number of catalogued synthetic earthquakes that would be detected by the current generation of warning algorithms prior to damaging shaking and tsunami waves reaching populated areas.
• analyse the usefulness of warning times within the context of emergency management and response infrastructure.

Our goal is to develop recommendations for decision-makers on suitable Earthquake Early Warning and Tsunami Early Warning technologies for Aotearoa New Zealand.