HONOLULU-
The federal government plans to increase by five times the number of advanced earthquake monitors in the Hawaiian Islands within 18 months, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said Monday.
The idea was not prompted by last week’s magnitude 6.7 earthquake off the Big Island, said Gerard Fryer, a geophysicist at the center, though the instruments would help keep track of such temblors.
Instead, pans to install 12 new “broadband seismometers” around the islands were hatched after a 9.1-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Indonesia’s Sumatra Island in December 2004, triggering a tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people in 11 countries.
Hawaii currently only has three broadband seismometers, the standard instrument used to measure large earthquakes around the world, Fryer said. One is on the Big Island at Pohakuloa and two are on Oahu: one at Kipapa and the other at Ewa Beach.
When the Oct. 15 earthquake hit, officials at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center relied on some lower-quality seismic monitors off the Big Island to measure the power of the jolt.
“We were very lucky with this earthquake,” he said. “It was just the right distance from a number of seismometers run by the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory that we could get nice recordings of the earthquake without things going off scale.”
If it was bigger than 6.7 magnitude, or further south, he said, “We would not have figured out how big it was as quickly as we did.”
Officials hope to install the new broadband seismometers within 18 months.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which operates the Tsunami Warning Center at Ewa Beach, is paying for them, but they will be operated in collaboration with the U.S. Geological Survey.
The data will be archived by the Incorporated Research Institutes for Seismology, which runs the global seismographic network, and will be available worldwide.
The new instruments will be located in fairly remote places, mostly on state or federal land, about a mile from the coastline, Fryer said.
“If we can put them in bunkers or caves, fine, but in many instances we will have to excavate a hole and pour concrete, to make a seismic vault. … Putting these things in is an art as much as science,” Fryer said.
Data will be transmitted automatically to the warning center and around the world in real time, Fryer said. Each device will have two independent communication pathways so if something happens to one, data still will flow, he said.
The center is installing “newer, bigger and better computers” and has requested a wider communication band to handle the deluge of data not only from the seismic instruments in Hawaii, but from outside, he said.
“We’re excited,” Fryer added. “We performed well on Sunday, but we did so almost by accident. Our intent is always to perform well and do so by design.”
