Early warning systems have improved disaster management systems in saving lives and damages of properties. The improvement of early warning systems is succeeded due to numerical weather prediction (NWP) so that we can predict any extreme events such as thunderstorm, heavy precipitation, and tornadoes.
However, there are a few failures of warning systems such as communicating vulnerable communities and people’s unawareness. The warning system has another responsibility to communicate with the disaster management department for alarming disaster prone areas.
One of the most important factor of disaster management is to alert the vulnerable communities for rehabilitation before the incident of disasters. However, it is seen from the history that the warning system was not well communicated and a huge damage happened and human lives threatened. A news reported in Nature, “When a magnitude-9.1 earthquake shuddered to life off the Sumatran coast on 26 December 2004, there was no systematic way to alert communities across the Indian Ocean that a devastative wave might be coming. Afterwards, with some 230,000 people dead and US$14 billion in damages are reported”. This news shows even though there was a warning given, the news was not reached among the vulnerable areas that caused deadly damages in the history.
It proves that though there was a warning given, the warning fails due to miscommunication of sending the alert information. Thus along with improvement of NWP and warning system, there is a necessity to communicate with the vulnerable communities in order to reduce damages and vulnerabilities (referring to warning services).
In order to improve the communication and more enhance studies of extreme events, there is planted seismometers, satellites observations and coastal-gauges near the Indian Ocean. The figure shows how the network system has improved after the lesson learned from Tsunami 2004 over the Indian Ocean. The network system covers observations as well as alarming people with ample time to evacuate from any disasters warns around those remote locations.
Figure: Improved of Network systems Near the Indian Ocean after a decade of Tsunami 2004(Witze, 2014)
Problem of typhoon warning system
Figure2: Experimenting Critical Rainfall for assessing Landslides in Piedmont Region. (Aelotti, 2004)
Moreover, another important fact is for general public to consider the warning system seriously and be aware of hazardous incidents. With the cooperation among civilians and warning services, we expect to utilize NWP knowledge to reduce impacts of disasters and combat disasters. Along with awareness among public, there is a necessity to address vulnerable areas to disasters such as effects of tornadoes or heavy precipitation to landslides. By assessing such disasters, the importance should be given to build observation stations with accurate studies. These information and experiments are required in preventive measurement that can be taken later on such as building dams, or shelter homes with warning services and even no localities in severe hazardous prone areas.
An example is obtained from piedmont region in North West Italy where there are landslidings due to heavy rainfall and infrequent events. Here, they assessed the rainfall over a decade and experimented a threshold rainfall amount that would correspond to landslides in these regions. These studies were considered with multiple rain gauges and careful observation for constructing a threshold value of rainfall.
Solution of typhoon warning system
The suggestions for improving better warning systems
-developing warning services in disaster prone areas with maps also for evacuation maps
-improving training among communities so that can receive and work at fast responses
-teach those warning system well and can be understandable among general people
-increase observation stations among disaster prone areas for accurate information
-studies and researches about disaster prone areas and update information
-constructing threshold values in order to combatting disasters