India, along with 23 other countries, is participating in a major Indian Ocean-wide mock tsunami drill on September 9 and 10 that is aimed at testing the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning and Mitigation System (IOTWS).
The drill, organised under the auspices of UNESCO's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, is expected to increase preparedness, evaluate response capabilities in each country and improve coordination throughout the region, an official statement here said.
"The drill also aims at evaluating the system's operational capacity, efficiency of communication among the different concerned actors, and the state of preparation of national emergency services," it said.
The Indian Tsunami Early Warning Centre (ITEWC), based out of the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS), Hyderabad, an autonomous institution under the Ministry of Earth Sciences, would participate in this drill, both in its capacity as National Tsunami Warning Centre (NTWC) for India as well as one of the Regional Tsunami Advisory Service Providers (RTSP) in the Indian Ocean region.
The ITEWC, operational since October 2007, has all the necessary computational infrastructure for the reception of real-time data from seismic and sea-level networks, tsunami modeling, as well as generation and dissemination of tsunami bulletins for the entire Indian Ocean region.
Since October 12, 2011, ITEWC, along with other RTSPs (Australia and Indonesia), has taken over the responsibility of providing tsunami bulletins of Indian Ocean member countries, under the IOC/UNESCO's ICG/IOTWS framework, the statement said.
The mock drill would simulate tsunamis originating from two earthquake sources on successive days, one in the eastern Indian ocean and the other in the north-western Indian ocean.
