Uncertainty is bad for business, bad for research, bad for productivity, and terrible on morale. I am on NOAA’s Tsunami Science and Technology Advisory Panel (it is a volunteer position and I don’t get paid) and I know a number of people fairly high up in the organization. For the last few weeks, I’ve been asking what they know or expect, and the answer is a unanimous “we don’t know.”The U.S. tsunami program is a very small part of NOAA. It includes the two tsunami warning centers, tsunami research at the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, and underpins state tsunami hazards reduction programs through the National Tsunami Hazards Mitigation Program (NTHMP). Full disclosure — grants from the NTHMP have funded much of our North Coast tsunami outreach effort, including the newest edition of Living on Shaky Ground.In the first round of cuts, the tsunami program lost its administrator, the person who coordinates the different pieces of the program, several support personnel, and a newly hired forecaster at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. Two recently approved positions at the International Tsunami Information Center were frozen.I am far more concerned about what might be happening next. Two years ago, NOAA finally recognized the need to put our two tsunami warning centers on a common operating system truly capable of backing each other up. At present, the centers in Hawaii and Alaska use different hardware and software and operate under separate administrative parts of NOAA. I am worried that budget cutting could set this project back, continuing the current inefficient system.I am even more concerned about the maintenance and support of our offshore tsunami detection system. The Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis (DART) has been a huge step forward in our ability to assess the potential of a tsunami to cause damage.Read More
