But alongside the remembrance events, a report by the German news agency dpa caused concern, when respected meteorologist Smith Dharmasaroja warned that the tsunami warning system was essentially broken, and Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra agreed that disaster prevention needed a lot of work.

Another tsunami would be hard to detect in southern Thailand now, said Mr Smith.

“There was a regional tsunami warning system in place six years ago but now it doesn’t work,” dpa quoted Mr Smith, who warned the government about the risk of a tsunami striking the country years before.

Mr Smith, who was appointed chairman of the National Disaster Warning Administration in 2005 and assigned to put a warning system in place, said the system was no longer functioning properly. Warning buoys placed off Phuket in 2005 have not functioned reliably from a lack of replacement parts, he said.

“Even some of the warning towers don’t work,” said Mr Smith, who was attending a memorial service in Phuket when he talked to the dpa reporter.

“Just (Sunday) big waves hit the eastern coast of Thailand, flooding many houses, and there were no warnings of that storm,” Mr Smith said.

The cause of a tsunami is an earthquake or an underwater landslide. Earthquakes cause most tsunamis, though the pile of silt accumulated in the Bay of Bengal from the Ganga is a cause for concern. The science of detecting an underwater landslide/mudslide is not fully developed, so let us leave that aside for now. The science of detecting earthquakes as they occur (not predicting them) and calculating their tsunamigenic potential has advanced greatly since 2004.

In the Great Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami earlier this year, both the Japanese and the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC) broke their previous best records. The distance between Japan and Hawai’i did not matter.

1. PTWC issued its preliminary earthquake message 4min 8s after origin (when the Earthquake started). This had a magnitude of 7.5.

2. Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) issued two warning bulletins, one in its capacity as the local tsunami warning center for Japan, and another in its capacity as the NWPTAC (Northwest Pacific Tsunami Advisory Center). The warning JMA issued as the NWPTAC was sent about 9mins after origin. By international agreement, since the earthquake fell in the NWPTAC’s area of responsibility PTWC waited until JMA issued the bulletin and used JMA’s parameters in its own bulletin to avoid confusion (at least for the first bulletin).

3. JMA, in its capacity as the national warning agency issued the warning in 4 minutes, at most, 8 seconds ahead of PTWC.

4. A better indication of how far tsunami detection and monitoring has come since 2004 is indicated by PTWC’s response to the Mentawai earthquake on Oct 25, 2010. PTWC issued a local watch/warning for Sumatra 6m 35s after the earthquake. BMG (Indonesia’s national warning agency) also issued a warning about 5m 30s after origin.

Other than for the “comfort” factor of having your own national capability, there is no real scientific rationale for national centers. All resources should be concentrated in two or three regional centers. We should focus our efforts on national systems for converting regional alerts into authoritative warnings and to ensure that the warnings actually reach the people in the path of the tsunami.

Ratio between noisy and clean data for India and Sri Lanka

Fidelity of digitized data in the Real-Time Biosurveillance Program (RTBP) was not promising; especially with the personnel in Sri Lanka with no medical knowledge but technically capable were producing up to 45% noisy data (second stacked graph). On the contrary the medically trained but less fluent in mobile phone usage Indian nurses were less prone to producing noisy data. The Indian health workers had an incentive because the erroneous data would produce false alarms, and they would need to respond to these false alarms or it would portray a bad image of the health situation in their area; while the Sri Lanka data digitizing personnel had no incentive besides picking up a paycheck for the data entry work they did. The data was submitted through the mHealthSurvey mobile software that works on less expensive Java-enabled hand-helds.

High counts of fever cases in a single location on a single day

The RTBP envisions that hospital data is submitted each day; thus, the real-time expectations. However, there were irregularities with batch entry of data. This is perfectly fine provided the actual patient visitation time is recorded (case-date).  Moreover, they were submitting cases of fever. This can be easily explained with the fact that the recruited data entry personnel were required to submit an average number of records per month and it is possible that they were cheating to meet their quota to receive the full pay check. In the statistical analyses tools this would depict an unusual escalation of fever cases for that day. Similar malicious coding of health records related to Measles and Tetanus disease burdens were found in the analyses carried out by the research analyst – Lujie Chen (Auton Lab).

Lujie also observed biases in preliminary diagnosis of certain disease, which manifest in in similar way, for example flu-like symptoms. The Variance in doctors preference can range from common cold, Cough, Respiratory Tract Infection. This issue of doctor preference may dilute signals and reduce the ability to quickly detect emerging outbreaks.

The effects of low quality data invalidating epidemiological surveillance, is a challenge that the RTBP faces (click to view paper on “automated detection of data entry errors“. These findings were presented at the International Society for Disease Surveillance 2010 conference in Park City (UT), USA by our colleagues from Carnegie Mellon Universities Auton Lab.

Click to view the ISDS 2010 data quality slides

A paper on the “challenges of introducing disease surveillance technology in developing countries“; was also submitted to the ISDS 2010 conference.

- Mobiles on Health Calls, The Hindu Business Line, September 13, 2010

- Pilot study in using mobile technology for disease reporting shows promise, Thehindu.com, July 07, 2010

– Pilot study on epidemiological early disease warning system, Chennaionline.com, July 07, 2010

- New tech to keep tab on diseases, timesofindia.com, July 08,10

- Cellphone-based technology to build the arteries for healthcare, Livemint.com, Sep 03, 10

- Building mobile health, Thehindu.com , September 17,10

- New mobile technology can cut biosurveillance cost by 50%, Financialexpress.com, Aug 06, 2010

- Detecting disease-mobile way, expressbuzz.com, July 08,10

- Health on the Go, Voice and Data, September 2010

- Cell Phones to Track Diseases, Deccan Chronicle, July 07, 2010

A new mathematical formula that could be used to give advance warning of where a tsunami is likely to hit and how destructive it will be has been worked out by scientists at Newcastle University.

The research, led by Newcastle University’s Professor Robin Johnson, was prompted by the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami disaster which devastated coastal communities in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand.

In this instance, an earthquake in the depths of the ocean triggered a long surface wave which resulted in six massive wave fronts, one after the other.

Of these waves it was the third and largest one that caused the most devastation, hitting the beaches with terrifying speed. Reaching a height of 20m, it is this wave that lifted a train from its tracks as it travelled along the Sri Lankan coastline, killing almost 1,000 people.

The full story.