Tsunami is a natural disaster that has the possibility of causing many victims. To overcome this problem, scientists from the United States Space Agency (NASA) are trying to detect tsunamis.
Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory are testing an innovation called GUARDIAN, a system for detecting tsunamis using GPS signals.
The GUARDIAN which stands for GNSS Upper Atmospheric Real-time Disaster Information and Alert Network is expected to improve the tsunami early warning system.
This system uses GPS signals to track waves in the Pacific Ring of Fire. The tool will filter the signals to get an indication of a tsunami appearing in a location, so that it can provide information to the nearest affected land area.
"We envision GUARDIAN one day complementing existing land and sea based instruments, such as seismometers, buoys and tide gauges which are highly effective but lack systematic coverage in the open sea," said Siddharth Krishnamoorthy of the JPL development team quoted from Scientech Daily, Sunday (4/6/2023).
Although navigation tools attempt to correct disturbances in the ionosphere, scientists can use it as an alarm signal to save residents.
"Instead of correcting these as errors, we use them as data to find natural hazards," said Leo Martier, JPL scientist who co-developed GUARDIAN.
This innovation can provide an additional hour of waiting time for a tsunami, which is very useful for affected areas to immediately save themselves from the terrible waves that will crash land in that instant.
So far, GUARDIAN is in the development stage. Likewise with the focus area only on the Pacific Ring of Fire where more than 750 tsunamis occurred in the period 1900 to 2015.