AI-Powered System Detects Tsunami in Real-Time

RADARINDONESIANEWS. COM, JAKARTA – Tsunami waves are notoriously difficult to detect when they move quickly in the open ocean towards the coast. However, in the summer of 2025, scientists witnessed one of the tsunamis as the giant waves were rolling.

The earthquake on the Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia, in july 2025 was the strongest earthquake in the world for almost 15 years.

The earthquake measuring 8.8 on the Richter scale triggered a tsunami with a wave speed of more than 644km/hour. Within minutes, alarms sounded in various countries in the pacific Ocean region, including Indonesia.

Millions of people were ordered to evacuate, including at least two million in Japan. However, when the wave rolls across the ocean, it creates ripples in the Earth’s atmosphere.

The ocean, which moves up and down across such a vast area, disrupts the atmosphere above, disrupting global satellite navigation signals. Though, this disturbance also allows scientists to detect tsunamis almost directly (real-time).

Coincidentally, the previous day, the US space agency, NASA, had added an artificial intelligence (AI) component to its disaster warning system called Guardian.Thanks to this component,Guardian can report major events to scientists automatically.

About 20 minutes after the Kamchatka earthquake occurred, tsunami observers could tell that the tsunami was heading towards Hawaii, 30 to 40 minutes before the wave arrived.

Millions of people around the world can breathe a sigh of relief because the tsunami did not cause devastating damage. The waves that hit Hawaii reached a height of 1.7 meters, but only caused minor flooding and no serious damage.

the majority of a tsunami’s energy is dissipated in the open ocean, while the largest waves hit uninhabited areas.Though, even if the impact of the tsunami was worse at that time, the extra minutes of early warning could be crucial.

This incident proves that NASA has a system that, under the right conditions, can detect tsunamis long before they arrive at the coastline.

How to?

The system listens for radio signals used by global navigation satellites when communicating with ground stations on Earth. Similar methods can detect volcanic eruptions,rocket launches and underground nuclear weapons tests.

“They can tell almost instantly, ‘ther’s a tsunami,'” said Jeffrey anderson, a data scientist at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research who helped develop the Guardian system.

Anderson admits that years ago, when he first heard about the development of the technology, he thought it sounded “a bit crazy”.

The idea of using radio signals between satellites in orbit and stations on the ground to detect tsunamis as they occur has been around for decades.

A number of academic papers in the 1970s discussed the principles of the system, but it was only in the 2020s that the system became a reality with the arrival of the Guardian.

In 2022, Anderson and scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, USA, published a study that introduced crucial details of the system.

the reason why navigation satellite signals can record tsunamis is because of the rising and falling movements of the sea.

When a tsunami begins to form in the open ocean, the waves ma