Toward a Euro Mediterranean Tsunami Warning System: the case of the February 12, 2007 Ml=6.1 earthquake

UNESCO has made a commitment to the scientific community for the creation of the North
East Atlantic and Mediterranean Tsunami Warning System (NEAMTWS). We wonder: “Is
the European Seismological community ready to run an Euro Mediterranean Tsunami
Warning System?”. In this study we use the February 12, 2007 Ml=6.1 earthquake, which
occurred close to the epicenter of the 1755 Great Lisbon event, as a case study to verify and
discuss our actual capability of alerting for a hypothetical tsunami.
Starting from the available real-time data and tools, we emulate an automatic real-time
processing to perform the source analyses needed for discriminating a tsunamigenic
earthquake, and subsequently we evaluate the time shift between the release of results and the
potential tsunami waterfront reaching the coasts.

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