The National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention will put seismometers and tsunami gauges at 154 locations on the Pacific seafloor off Japan’s eastern coast.
The National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention will put seismometers and tsunami gauges at 154 locations on the Pacific seafloor off Japan’s eastern coast.
The network, stretching from Hokkaido's Nemuro coast to Chiba Prefecture's Boso peninsula, will be able to detect a tsunami up to 20 minutes earlier than the existing system, the institute said on March 29. Offshore earthquake detection is expected to be up to 30 seconds faster.
The system is scheduled to be completed in fiscal 2014, at an expected cost of 33 billion yen ($402 million).
“The new underwater observation network would allow us to send information more quickly,” an institute official said. “That would lead to quicker evacuations and help make early earthquake warnings more precise.”
The institute will install seismometers and tsunami gauges in pairs at depths of up to 8,000 meters. Five sea areas will have 25 pairs each, with each pair spaced about 30 kilometers from the next. The institute will also set up a second series of sensors at 50-kilometer intervals along Japan’s eastern coast.
The institute said data from around-the-clock observations will be sent through optical fiber cables to facilities on the ground.
The University of Tokyo, the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology and other institutes have seismic and tsunami gauges allowing real-time observation in the same waters, but only a little more than 10 locations are currently covered, the institute said.