[S20-P] Poster

[S20-P-02] Recording TEC profiles from aircrafts for tsunami early warning

^○Melanie Drilleau¹, Pierdavide Coisson¹, Lucie Rolland², Philippe Lognonne¹, Halflidi Jonsson³, Virgile Rakoto¹, Khaled Khelfi¹, Giovanni Occhipinti¹ (1.Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, Paris, France, 2.Geoazur, Nice, France, 3.Graduate School of Engineering and Applied Sciences & Center for Interdisciplinary Remotely Piloted Aircraft Studies, Monterey, CA, USA.)

Up to now, the best system to detect a tsunami in open ocean is the DART network of ocean-bottom pressure sensors. While the DART system has contributed significantly to tsunami early-warnings during recent events, the network suffers from an inadequate distribution of sensors and from serious maintenance problems. To increase the efficiency of the warning system, we developed a software to estimate the flight route of aircrafts for an optimized data acquisition of the Total Electron Content (TEC) using their onboard GPS receiver. The fundamental goal is to then invert these data to estimate the minimum tsunami height. This software has been developed in the framework of the TWIST project (Tsunami Warning and Ionosphere Seismic Tomography), funded by the Office of Naval Research of the US Navy. It estimates the most suitable take-off time(s) for the aircraft to record TEC data. After the calculation of the tsunami travel times, a flight route is estimated for a given take-off time. Knowing the location of the satellites, the locations of the Ionospheric Pierce Points are determined. Then, the simulated TEC values are assigned to these locations, using a modified version of the NeQuick electron density model (Nava et al., 2008). Finally, the quality of the data recorded during the flight route is assessed. The criterion is defined in order to favor (1) the flight routes with a maximum number of satellites in visibility by the aircraft and (2) the flight routes with a maximum of complete data during the recording time for a given satellite. This processing is made for different take-off times to choose which time interval is the most appropriate for the recording of TEC data. We are working with the CIRPAS (Center for Interdisciplinary Remotly-Piloted Aircraft Studies) in Monterey, California, to realize TEC measurements using Twin Otter aircrafts. We hope that our collaboration will make possible a first flight in the following month.