awakened to the fact that they may need to move to higher ground. it is right now a watch. it could very easily be upgraded to a warning or it could also be canceled if there are no further threats to that area and of course we have all this very elaborate buoy system being monitored by the pacific tsunami warning center that will send out updates. they get wave readings about every six hours or so. you can bet they re going off repeatedry now as they measure maybe to maybe a six inch difference. while it s important that we look at what may be coming to hawaii and the west coast, it s also important to take a look at what s happening in japan. the death toll now officially at 29. also important to note that japan has quite a well developed arsenal of nuclear power plants,
the initial forecast a foot and a half up to eight feet. we got the blip, just not as big as they have anticipated. still some things we don t know about what happens during these conditions. but one of the ways that we detect this as it moves through the ocean is what we call the dark buoy system and noaa has placed all these sensors out here in the middle of the ocean so we can detect these little changes in the earth s crust. there is a sensor on the bottom of the ocean floor to detect these changes and we saw the rises and the falls among those. so, there is a lot we know about these things, but still a long ways we have to go in order to understand. but worse case scenario, it was a good warm up for hawaii and other places across the pacific basin as to what they need to do when something like this happens. also one other point i want to make.
first. that s a great point. is that measured by the buoy system we have? can you explain that? caller: it is. it s a part of it. it s a small part of it. it s a deep ocean network of gauges and they are anchored to the ocean bottom. there s a device on the ocean bottom that measures the height of the ocean, basically. it s sensitive to down to a few millimeters, i believe. it relays up to satellite and it only sends us information about once every six hours unless there s an event because it has limited battery power. so we get that information and they are called dart. the dart buoys either manually or automatically depending on what they see. and then we ll get the information more rapidly.