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Capacity Building in Inundation Mapping and Evacuation Planning in the Northwest Indian Ocean
Muscat, April 鈥� In an initiative to strengthening tsunami resilience, UNESCO Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (UNESCO-IOC), supported a capacity building on tsunami inundation mapping and tsunami evacuation planning for 5 countries in the Northwest Indian Ocean Region. This effort is part of the 鈥淪trengthening Tsunami Early Warning in the North-West Indian Ocean through Regional Cooperation 鈥� Phase 2c鈥� project, funded by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) Tsunami Trust Fund.
From April 21-25, 2024, the Directorate General of Oman Meteorology of the Civil Aviation Authority in Muscat, Oman, hosted a capacity-building workshop. The workshop brought together 40 participants in tsunami warning, research, and disaster management from India, Iran, Pakistan, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). An additional 25 participants joined online sessions, creating a vibrant mix of in-person and virtual collaboration. The workshops were facilitated by trainers from the UNESCO-IOC Indian Ocean Tsunami Information Center (IOTIC), UNESCO-IOC Secretariat for the Intergovernmental Coordination Group for the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning and Mitigation System (ICG/IOTWMS), along with experts from Germany, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, and Norway.
During this insightful five-day workshop, participants had the chance to assessed existing tsunami inundation maps and strategized on the development of enhanced versions, using outcomes from the Probabilistic Tsunami Hazard Assessment (PTHA) work.. The PTHA for the North-West Indian Ocean (NWIO) was developed with the support of the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ), Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV), Norwegian Geotechnical Institute (NGI), and Indian Nation Centre for Ocean Information Systems (INCOIS).
The workshops also helped to build capacity in tsunami evacuation mapping in the project pilot areas in Kerela (India), Chabahar and Jask (Iran), Gwadar and Karachi (Pakistan), Al Hail North (Oman), and Fijairah (UAE). Participants commented that the sharing of experiences in tsunami inundation and evacuation mapping among neighboring counties was valuable for refining their implementation processes in-country.
Building on the momentum, the project will continue to support national teams in organizing stakeholder meetings to refine the tsunami evacuation maps initiated during the workshops, and then test the maps through community exercises. Similar consultations will be held and supported to develop and test tsunami evacuation maps for the other pilot areas.
Presentations and documents from the workshops are available at:
