8 . A better early warning system for tsunamis may soon be possible with the help of artificial intelligence. AI technology can detect very small disturbances in satellite signals when a tsunami’s waves begin to form, which could bring felicity to coastal communities, providing warnings long before the tsunami hits.
“There is no global network for detecting tsunami waves, and setting up physical hardware, like buoy-based systems, is expensive,” says Valentino Constantinou at Teran Orbital Corporation, a satellite manufacturing company based in Florida. “But we know that small satellites are just increasing rapidly everywhere.”
Those GPS satellites are important because they constantly exchange radio signals with ground stations. Crucially, the speed of the radio signals is affected by the density (密度) of charged particles (带电粒子) in an area of Earth’s ionosphere (电离层). Tsunami-caused shock waves travelling up into the atmosphere affect the density of these particles, generating small but measurable changes in the satellite radio signals.
Constantinou and his colleagues developed a computer program to measure changes in the density of these charged particles caused by the formation of a tsunami and then transformed the data into images that can be analysed by AI models. They then tasked the AI with identifying tsunami-related features within the images.
The researchers trained and tested the AI on data from three earthquake-caused tsunamis: one that struck Chile in 2010, a 2011 event in Japan and an event that occurred off Canada’s west coast in 2012. They then confirmed the AI’s performance on data from a fourth tsunami, which was caused by the 2015 Ⅲapel earthquake off the coast of Chile. This showed how well the AI could distinguish tsunami-related disturbances from normal variations in the ionosphere.
But Constantinou says it remains to be seen if performance based on data from four tsunami events can lead to accurate detection of a more diverse set of tsunamis and the rarity of huge tsunamis makes it challenging to analyse and predict such events. A truly effective tsunami detection system would also require international cooperation to share data from satellite stations.
1. What does the underlined word “felicity” probably mean in Paragraph 1?
| A．Challenge. | B．Welfare. | C．Qualification. | D．Freedom. |
2. Why do GPS satellites matter to tsunami detection?
| A．They stay steady in extreme weather conditions. |
| B．They can predict the exact location of a coming tsunami. |
| C．Their signals can directly pass through Earth’s ionosphere. |
| D．Their signals can reflect charged particle density changes. |
3. What was the data from the 2015 tsunami used for?
| A．Showing the damage brought by tsunamis. |
| B．Proving the accuracy of the AI’s performance. |
| C．Helping the AI analyse tsunami information. |
| D．Offering basic information on tsunami detection skills. |
4. What may be a suitable title for the text?
| A．AI can spot early signs of a tsunami |
| B．A tsunami warning system is on the way |
| C．Satellites play a key role in global cooperation |
| D．Tsunamis won’t be a threat to humans in the future |
