NOAA Report on the Indonesian Tsunami

The NOAA Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii issued an information bulletin at 8:14 p.m. EST Saturday, indicating that a magnitude 8.0 earthquake had occurred off the west coast of Northern Sumatra. Within a few hours of learning of the tsunamis that killed thousands in Indonesia Saturday night, Vasily Titov, associate director of the Tsunami Inundation Mapping Efforts, or TIME, at the NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, Wash., and his counterpart in Japan had created preliminary model estimates of the event.