Hazards Tsunami
Last updated:18 June 2024
Geoscience Australia’s Community Safety team supports Australia’s ability to manage the impact of tsunami and helps inform decisions about risk.
We contribute to each stage of the emergency management cycle to help improve preparedness, response and recovery with our focus on contributing towards community safety.
Our role
We operate the National Earthquake Alerts Centre to provide around the clock monitoring, analysis and alerting of significant earthquakes. This program provides alerts of earthquakes that have the potential to generate tsunami that could impact Australia's coastline.
We provide nationally consistent methodologies for estimating the frequency of tsunamis offshore, which are widely used to inform site-specific tsunami inundation hazard assessments. We also conduct onshore hazard assessments and work with governments and the emergency management sector to inform risk mitigation strategies
To help understand what could be at threat from tsunami, we provide exposure information about buildings, demographics, community infrastructure and agricultural commodities.
We also provide around the clock access to data about people, property and infrastructure potentially exposed during an event. Our information aids in providing an understanding of a tropical cyclone situation to targeted preparedness, response and recovery efforts.
Our products, tools and data provide a better understanding of hazard vulnerabilities for all sectors to plan, prepare and reduce exposure to natural hazards improving preparedness now and into the future.
Emerging capabilities
We engage with different sectors to provide assessments and address new challenges as they emerge.
- We are collaborating on onshore tsunami hazard assessments at multiple sites nationally (Western Australia, City of Gold Coast), and internationally via programs with DFAT.
- Our Researchers are committed to growing our knowledge base to prepare for challenges of the future.
- We have a strong attendance at conferences and events to maintain awareness of the challenges faced by the community safety sector and keep up to date with latest science.
- Our open-source data is accessed by developers interested in solving operational challenges of reducing vulnerability and exposure to hazards.
Top products
Probabilistic Tsunami Hazard Assessment (PTHA)
Model the frequency of tsunamis around the Australian coast.
Joint Australian Tsunami Warning Centre (JATWC)
The Joint Australian Tsunami Warning Centre (JATWC) provides 24 hour tsunami monitoring, assessment and warnings.
AusSeabed Marine Data portal
Explore seafloor mapping products, such as bathymetry, backscatter, side scan sonar data, as well as a suite of analytical assessment tools, across Australia’s marine jurisdiction prior to downloading.
An evaluation of onshore digital elevation models for modeling tsunami inundation zones
Different onshore digital elevation models (DEMs) for simulating the extent of tsunami inundation using case studies from two locations in Indonesia.
Bathymetry
View the datasets and procedures used to produce the 2009 bathymetric grid of Australia.
Multibeam bathymetry
View high resolution bathymetric grids from each of our marine surveys.
Project Mapping and modelling the impact of earthquake-generated tsunamis on the coastal communities of Western Australia
How Geoscience Australia is creating evidence-based inundation maps to guide emergency management planning for earthquake-generated tsunamis.