Announcing the Global Tsunami Model Association

When looking at the history of tsunami research, considering the early efforts, two trends can be observed. Academic tsunami research was carried out in diverse disciplines with boosts after large global events, such as the 1960 Chile event that lead to the creation of warning centers in the U.S. and Japan in the Pacific, or the 2004 Indian Ocean event that had a large impact on global tsunami preparedness efforts, supported by IOC UNESCO and other global organizations. On the other hand, the engineering community in particular in the United States created building codes and formalized such hazard prevention measures.

Efforts were made to gather the scientific community and the well established series of tsunami sessions at AGU and EGU meetings is just one indication for this. The IUGG Joint Tsunami Commission formalized some of the community effort in tsunami research, and the Tsunami Society International with its International Journal Science of Tsunami Hazards has been instrumental to gather important information and progress in tsunami science.

Around 2015 it became clear that there is demand for a formal approach to an integration of scientific progress and transfer into stakeholder groups, involving social sciences, geosciences, engineering, and computational sciences. Adopting some of the probabilistic approaches from seismic hazard assessment, covering uncertainty quantification, and developing multi-scale approaches to hazard and risk analysis, communicating and applying these topics was outside of the purely scientific agenda.

The idea for a Global Tsunami Model (GTM) entity was born, borrowed from the Global Earthquake Model (GEM) foundation. Further discussions within the community at several international meetings  finally led to the idea of applying for a COST Action, funded through the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST). The COST Action AGITHAR was then instrumental in further developing and forming a basis for an entity supporting the ideas mentioned before. Accompanied by successful European Research Council funded projects related to tsunami hazard and risk assessment a portfolio of products and services could be developed. A further one-year funding from COST for sustaining the efforts of AGITHAR, finally led to the inauguration of the Global Tsunami Model Association, a registered association under German legislation.

In this presentation we announce GTM Association and invite the global community to become part of this initiative. The presentation will give a brief overview of the history of GTM, will introduce the vision and mission of the association, as well as outline the governing structure. We present the assets as well as our ideas on a sustained business model with a variety of development paths open to the community. While much of the development took place in the European context so far due to funding opportunities, GTM is global and will extend internationally. GTM is committed to serve the scientific community, stakeholder groups as well as the general society by coordination, knowledge transfer, and scientific progress as a non-for-profit organization.