Sunday, October 28, 2012

The tsunami chronicles.

Aloha to everyone on the Warning List.  This is information only, no action or replies required.

After an earthquake in the Pacific basin, I start watching the buoys and other instruments - usually within a minute.  I can do that remotely.  They are dispersed throughout the Pacific, specifically to measure vertical wave amplitude and timing.  If you pull up the chart - I am one of the few geeks interested in things like that - and you see hours of 8-12' vertical movement with ~7 second spacing and the occasional 20 or 30' wave in sets... and the you see one rogue displacement of 20 or 50 or 100' that is not synchronized with the sets, you can pretty well figure some water was displaced somewhere.  The Tohoku-oki event looked like this.  THIS IS A TSUNAMI:

Tohoku-oki_event

If you are watching the series of instruments which happen to be between....for instance....Japan and Hawaii and you see it on consecutive buoys inbound, you have a tsunami - and you can time the speed exactly and estimate to within a minute when and where it will strike.

There are occasional rogue waves which seem to appear from nowhere - an interesting article in the Wiki is here:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_wave  but they do not continue across oceans.
The only one ever recorded, the Draupner freak wave - looked like this.  This is NOT a tsunami.

Drauper_freak_wave

That's how I knew there would be a tsunami from Fukushima but not much from Vancouver.  And that's why I was out in the truck with the communications net operating after Fukushima and in bed when the sirens went off last night.  However, I did my duty and disseminated the warning information in a timely manner.

I shall continue to report government warnings in a timely manner - typically without comment and before the official announcements - I see the same information stream the tier one group sees and I don't have to wait for dozens of people to get out of bed and start collecting their double-time pay before I say something. 

Last night I did comment on one blog that there might be a small wave - but that there was no tsunami.  There wasn't.  When there is, I'll say so.  The same with Hurricanes.  But I am not an official so I cannot make official pronouncements.  What I CAN do is get it right every time.  These things are not guesses.  They are physical observations.  And, as at least several people on this list can verify, when you stop trusting your instruments and start guessing, you can make what is called a CFIT (Controlled Flight Into Terrain).  There is a nautical term as well:  " OH, SHI..."

Seriously, for all the money the government drips into shitholes in the middle east instead of into free college educations, it's not surprising that I have to do my own disaster management.

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