Indian Tsunami Early Warning Centre (ITEWC) which houses the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS) in Hyderabad stated that there is no tsunami threat to India following the detection of an earthquake of about magnitude 7.5 in the Ritcher Scale at 12.40 p.m. near the west coast of Honshu in Japan on Monday.
Senior scientist B. Ajay Kumar informed that the earthquake was detected in the Pacific Ocean and though ITEWC deals with such ocean hazards in the Indian Ocean, it was able to identify the source and the necessary information was passed onto the relevant countries within seven minutes of the occurrence when the threshold is 10 minutes.
“Pacific Ocean Tsunami Warning Centre (PTWC) and Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) have already issued a tsunami bulletin alerting several areas in Japan of waves of up to one to three metres of height. Ocean instruments like tide gauges and others have shown waves of up to one metre and wave height variations have come down to few centimetres in many places, but these are continuing even as we speak,” he explained. The ITEWC monitors the sea level changes near the epicentral region and reports in case of a tsunami threat.
