Reliable and accurate ocean information is critical for empowering users and authorities of island states and coastal areas to make informed planning and operational decisions. Through an effective early warning system, potential damage, exposure to risk and uncertainty is reduced and gives longer lead time for decision makers and communities at risk to plan anticipatory actions ahead of potential disaster and manage various maritime activities such as fishing, transportation, tourism among others.
Most RIMES Member States have access only to forecasts at coarse resolutions (global and regional scales), which are hard to interpret. Precise and realistic coastal hazard and risk assessment, e.g. tsunami and storm surge risks, requires local bathymetric and topographic and exposure datasets, with capacity to generate customised user-relevant information for reducing risks.
Major categories of services and advisory generation facilitated by RIMES:
- Service Level 1: 24/7 Earthquake Monitoring and Tsunami Watch
- Service Level 2: Tsunami Forecast
- Service Level 3: Tsunami Inundation Forecast and loss estimation
With collaboration among stakeholders, RIMES continues to push its research and development agenda to cater regional needs through:
- Improved ocean information systems and services to address member state’s priorities-based requirements for higher forecast resolution and addition of relevant ocean parameters and user feedback for model validation
- Synthesis across discipline to combine different aspects of maritime activities, planning, management of hazards and resources
- Integration of historical hazard and loss database to identity and flag locations of high risk areas based on frequency of past events and their impacts.
Enhancement of user-experience by improving visualization and geo-spatial planning feature for a comprehensive one-stop platform to integrate and overlay various layers of ocean-related datasets