UN meets in India on tsunami early warning system

HYDERABAD, India, Wednesday (AFP) Top scientists and government officials from over 25 nations on Wednesday launched talks aimed at setting up a tsunami early warning system for Indian Ocean countries by next year.

The UN's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, holding its second session on the system, will review progress made by the nations involved in the project and seek to plug implementation gaps. "The main objective is to find out ways to establish the early warning system," P.S. Goel, India's highest-ranking bureaucrat in the department of ocean development, told AFP on the sidelines of the three-day meeting.

Meeting participants will work to achieve "some kind of understanding in the sharing of ideas, technology and most importantly information," he added. Most of the 29 Indian Ocean nations did not have an early warning system when a massive undersea earthquake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra last December unleashed the giant waves, killing 217,000 people in 11 countries.

The UN commission was established at a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) conference in June in Paris with a mandate to set up a warning system and promote tsunami awareness.

The first meeting of a coordination group for the regional tsunami warning system, held in August in the western Australian city of Perth, set up working groups to deal with different aspects of the project.

These included measuring seismic activity, data collection and exchange, deep-sea tsunami detection measurements, tsunami hazard identification and establishment of a system bridging all the tasks.

"All these activities will now be reviewed and discussed," Goel said.