Tsunami travel times and detection capabilities for the Caribbean Region

On February 2010 the NOAA National Weather Service (NWS) established the Caribbean Tsunami Warning Program (CTWP) as the first step to form the Caribbean Tsunami Warning Center (CTWC). Since the Caribbean region in the Atlantic Ocean is very susceptible to tsunamis due to its tectonic and geographical setting, it has been recommended that a CTWC be established in the region to provide the most timely and effective tsunami products. This will help to improve the response time and prevent human loss. One of the tasks of the CTWP is to review the tsunami detection capabilities in the region. As part of this task, the tsunami travel times for the different tsunami sources to the coastal sea level and DART buoys needed to be calculated. A total of 184 locations were chosen as epicenters and evaluated using the Tsunami Travel Time (TTT) 2.21 software; wave travel and arrival time plots and tables for the Caribbean were produced. For a few events, the output calculated times were compared to the outputs produced by the Puerto Rico Seismic Network PR DANIS Sea Level tool kit, as a way to validate the TTT program.