Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services

Indian National Center for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS) is an autonomous organization of the Government of India, under the Ministry of Earth Sciences, located in Pragathi Nagar, Hyderabad.

During the 1990s, the Ministry of Earth Sciences, formerly Department of Ocean Development (DOD), had initiated a project titled "PFZ Mission" and it was handed over to National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC), Hyderabad, AP.

Another feature of PFZ service is the generation of species-specific advisory to enable the fishermen folk to distinguish between the exploited and under-exploited species in the potential fishing zones.

With the help of the parameters such as Oceanic Fronts, water clarity and sea surface temperature we can trace the distribution of tuna species.

Accordingly, on 15 October 2007, a centre housing the Indian Tsunami Early Warning System (TEWS) was established in INCOIS by the Ministry of Earth Sciences, the nodal ministry, with the collaboration of the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Department of Space (DOS), and Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).

At the time of its establishment, the centre had the mandate to provide important tsunami advisories to the people living in the coastal areas of the country.

[1] By 2012, the centre has started to give a round-the-clock alert and advisory services to all Indian Ocean Rim Countries (IOR).

These tide gauges have been positioned at Aerial Bay, Chennai, Ennore, Garden Reach, Haldia, Kandla, Karwar, Krishnapatnam, Marmagao, Machilipatnam, Nagapattinam, Paradeep, Port Blair, Vadinar, Visakhapatnam etc.

This network of tide gauges and buoys helps the center to validate the arrivals of tsunami waves in the Indian Ocean region.

[3] Using the data obtained from a network of equipments, models have been run to provide maps depicting inundation scenarios for the entire coastal belt.

When there is a disaster, the advisories are generated in intervals telling the location of the storm surges or tsunamis to help the local government authorities to evacuate the people from the regions that are likely to be affected.

This system was named as Argo, which emphasizes the strong complementary relationship between the free-drifting floats and Jason altimeter mission.

Basically, Argo builds on the existing upper-ocean thermal networks, extending their spatial and temporal coverage, depth range and accuracy, and improving them through the addition of salinity and velocity measurements.

The Argo system helps to study quantitatively the evolving state of the upper ocean and the patterns of its climate variability, including heat, fresh water storage and transport.