IASPEI - Picture Gallery

IUGG XXIV General Assembly July 2-13, 2007 Perugia, Italy
(S) - IASPEI - International Association of Seismology and Physics of the Earth's
Interior
JSS002 Oral Presentation 1733
A Tsunami Detection and Warning-focused Tide Station Metadata Web
Service
Dr. John Marra
NOAA NESDIS NCDC IDEA Center
Uday S. Kari, Stuart A. Weinstein
The Indian Ocean Tsunami of 26 December 2004 made it clear that information about tide stations that
could be used to support detection and warning (such as location, collection and transmission
capabilities, operator identification, etc.) are insufficiently known or not readily accessible. Parties
interested in addressing this problem united under the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) NESDIS/NCDC/IDEA Centers PRIDE program and in 2005 began an effort to
develop a distributed metadata system describing tide stations starting with pilot activities in a regional
framework and focusing on tsunami detection and warning systems being developed by various
agencies.* A summary of discussions and concepts related to this effort is described in the UNESCO
document IOC/INF-1226 of April 2006. This paper describes progress to date in this PRIDE-sponsored
effort. Specifically, it describes the components of a pilot tide station metadata web service, including an
XML-based schema that exposes, at a minimum, information in the NOAA National Weather Service
(NWS) Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC) station database needed to use the PTWCs Tide Tool
application. The schema includes as optional elements, information recommended in the IOTWS/WG2
Message Formats Content document generated at the ICG/PTWS-XXI meeting held in Melbourne
Australia on May 3-5 2006. This paper also describes a web-enabled client application that harvests
information from the web service and displays it via a graphical user interface that supports GIS-based
queries. Where available from the source, real time tide-station data can be accessed and viewed via
this application. Going beyond exposing and harvesting tide station metadata, a tsunami bulletin
schema based on PTWC Operations (Watchstander) manual and legacy business processes (specifically,
PACBUL) has also been developed as part of this effort. In this regard, an XML bulletin generator has
been prototyped and deployed on a test platform. Development of the type of distributed tide station
web service focused on tsunami detection and warning systems described here will also contribute to
other marine hazard warning systems (such as storm surges), as well as sea level change monitoring
and research. * National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service (NESDIS), National
Climatic Data Center (NCDC), Integrated Data and Environmental Applications (IDEA) Center, Pacific
Region Integrated Data Enterprise (PRIDE).
Keywords: tsunami, tidestations, service orientedarchitecture