If you missed the news back in July, one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded occurred off the coast of the actively volcanic Kamchatka Peninsula, which is where there's a subduction zone, which is why there are earthquakes and volcanoes there. There was a tsunami warning and there was a tsunami (see below) and much of coastal Hawaii moved to higher ground just in case. Though high water did happen, it wasn't catastrophic.
That one was a monstrous 8.8 on the Richter scale. On September 18 (which just turned into two days ago), there was another pretty big one (link to Scientific American write-up), 10x smaller, meaning it was a 7.8 seismic event.
Now, back to the 8.8. The NASA Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission (SWOT) accurately measures the height of the ocean surface. It just so happened that SWOT was making observations in the right place to capture a cross-section of the wave.
SWOT spots tsunami wave after Kamchatka quake (NASA Earth Observatory)
"The SWOT data on the height, shape, and direction of the tsunami wave are key to improving these types of forecast models. “The satellite observations help researchers to better reverse engineer the cause of a tsunami, and in this case, they also showed us that NOAA’s tsunami forecast was right on the money,” said Josh Willis, a JPL oceanographer."
So, Trump administration dummies and Congressional go-alongs: don't reduce funding for NASA science. The coastal home you evacuate in time might be your own.
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