A Tsunami Warning System for the Northeast Atlantic

In 2006, the UK Department for Food and Rural affairs (DEFRA) commissioned the British Geological Survey (BGS) to establish a system capable of detecting and discriminating earthquakes which could pose a tsunami risk to the UK. Previous studies for DEFRA had shown that the UK risk from tsunamis is low, but not negligible. The system must be able to become part of an integrated tsunami warning process, if one is implemented in the future. Rather than start from scratch in developing suitable earthquake detection software, the BGS chose to implement the EarlyBird software developed at the US NOAA West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center (Whitmore and Sokolowski, 2002). By selecting stations from seismic networks in over a dozen countries a composite network of more than 100 stations was built up that provides good coverage for our area of interest, which extends from the UK and surrounding waters to most of the North Atlantic, including offshore Portugal, the Mid-Atlantic ridge, the Caribbean, and the northeast coast of America.