Talk:Weather satellite

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Weather satellites and seismometers - any practical help for tsunamis as like for hurricanes and typhoons?

Question 1:- Can weather satellites detect long and high wave heights such as caused by Tsunamis as in earthquake in Indian Ocean off North Sumatra on 26-12-2004 if alerted by seismometers immediately when large ocean quakes occur or large meteors splashes.?

Question 2:- Does any Geology body alert Oceanography, Maritime or Naval bodies to monitor Tsunamis occurrences, track and record their path for rescue purposes, predict and post warnings of tsunami arrival times at various islands and coastlines?

Question 3:- Are the existing satellites able to record the land covered by tsunamis and coastal changes for rescue purposes and also for preparation for next tsunami?

Question 4:- Surface wind, storm conditions and tides - could they be factored into effect on tsunami severity?. Tides can have effect on people on beaches and fishermen presence on or off shore.

Can somebody please give some answers or set up some warning system.

Thomas Ng

  • 1: In satellite observation, you lose most of the vertical resolution of the Earth. It's virtually impossible to tell the height of the features below a satellite without a RADAR or LIDAR system. Such systems do exist on certain polar-orbiting satellites but coverage is spotty. It might be possible to set up a system that could watch for large-scale deformations, but not with currently existing equipment.
  • 2: USGS and other bodies do have a limited tsunami warning program [1], but it is of limited effectiveness and is not effective for immediate threats.
  • 3: Given the transient nature of tsunamis, it's hit-or-miss whether an imaging satellite will be overhead at the time, at least one that would be open to public scrutiny rather than a satellite belonging to intelligence operations, and such images would be of marginal help unless they could be delivered instantly to local emergency agencies.
  • 4: Storm conditions are usually minor compared to the power of major tsunamis. It's true that they might have an impact on the behaviour of people before the tsunami strikes, but it would probably be of negligible influence to the total damage.
  • There are many areas of technology that would need to be improved before some of these ideas could be implemented. I would suggest sending some of them along to space and seismology agencies so they may have a look at them to determine their implementability with current and future observation systems.

aw

What do these things look like? --Gangster Octopus 22:58, 23 November 2005 (UTC)