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The South Asian Tsunami is the common name given by the scientific community to a massive underwater earthquake that occurred in 2004 along the western coasts of Sumatra and Indonesia (Munich RE, 2013), and was one of the deadliest events in history. Several countries: Indonesia, Srilanka, India and Thailand were victimized by this terrible event (Lay et al., 2005; Lovholt et al., 2006). This tsunami lead to the deployment of the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning System (TWS) (Joseph, 2011) which was designed to predict tsunamis in real time and well in advance and generate warning messages for alerts or for mandatory evacuations. Despite the existence of this developed and operational tsunami warning system, there have been past instances when the expected alert warning messages were not generated (Lovholt et al., 2014). One such example stems from a recent report by the BBC, where the well-established Tsunami Early Warning System (TEWS) failed to generate any warning in response to a 7.8-scale earthquake that struck off the coast of West Sumatra on March 2, 2016 (BBC News, 2016). While many rationales (NewsNow, 2016) were cited for this catastrophic failure, distinctive gaps based on on-site experiences were addressed in a recent report (Lassa, 2016) by a research activist that addressed the following topics:
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Failure of tsunami sirens in remote areas;
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Forcing local authorities to revisit the monitoring of sea coasts and the effectiveness and authenticity of the generated warning messages;
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The dependency of local communities on buoys that analyze ocean wave behavior as the critical and sole indicators of tsunamis.
Similarly (as mentioned above) inspections have also been cited as culprits in various other scenarios (VoaNews, 2011) where experts have highlighted the inefficacy of prevailing warning systems. It is important to note that these warning systems were developed only after devastating events that had occurred years before (Lay et al., 2005; Lovholt, 2006) Figure 1a (Tsunami Bulletin, 2010) shows a still image taken after the fatal tsunami that hit Japan in 2011.
Clearly, such recent phenomena, which caused worldwide surprise and fear, highlight the dire need for efficient, alternative and complementary warning systems that would be effective in preparing for similar future tsunami events (UNISDR 2005). It is interesting to note that post-occurrence analysis of various historic tsunami events from various parts of world report on signs and signals produced by nature prior to such events. Anomalous and ambiguous behavioral responses towards seismicity have been cited in both animals and plants. These reports have been surveyed and debated by various researchers, scientists and risk reduction organizations (Waltham, 2005; Mott, 2005; Corea, 2008; Yamauchi et al., 2011).