"The Indian Ocean countries have agreed among themselves to set up a tsunami early warning system for the whole Indian Ocean basin," said meeting chairman Patricio Bernal, the executive secretary of the Intergovermental Oceanographic Commission (IOC).

As an interim step, these countries will receive seismic data from April 1 from earthquake monitoring stations in Tokyo and Hawaii.

In the medium term, technicians will set up tidal gauges at six sites in the eastern Indian Ocean, mainly near Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia, and upgrade 15 existing gauge sites elsewhere in the region, he said.

The instruments will be on the lookout for large waves 24 hours a day, seven days a week, providing a rudimentary alert system for tsunamis "from October-November," said Bernal.

The final step is a sophisticated system around the Indian Ocean that will comprise a regional warning centre and a network of seabed sensors and gauges, which in turn will alert 26 national tsunami warning centres.

This system, whose technical specifications will be hammered out in further meetings, will probably become operational from the end of 2006, said Bernal.

The meeting is the latest step to set up an alert system for the Indian Ocean after 11 Asian and African countries on its rim were hit by giant waves, unleashed by an undersea quake off Indonesia on December 26.

More than 270,000 people were killed and hundreds left homeless by the catastrophe.

The world's only tsunami system at present is in the Pacific Ocean.

It comprises seismic sensors that report detection of an earthquake to a warning center in Hawaii.

If the quake is major, an initial "tsunami watch" alert is dispatched.

Surface buoys and pressure sensors dotted at various points on the seabed then gauge whether a wave has passed. If a tsunami is detected, the centre then dispatches a full warning to countries, which then hands on the advice to citizens via national systems.

The Paris talks were held at the headquarters of the UN Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation under the auspices of the IOC, a UNESCO body that promotes international cooperation in the study of the sea.

National delegates to the IOC took part in the meeting, as well as major international agencies.

It came after the World Conference on Disaster Reduction in Kobe, Japan, from January 18-22, and at a ministerial meeting on tsunami coordination held in Phuket, Thailand, from January 28-29.

Bernal said two important aspects of the Indian Ocean scheme remain to be settled.

One is where to locate the regional warning centre, a question that will be debated in a meeting in Mauritius in April, he said.

France, for one, has suggested it be on the French island department of La Reunion. However, one idea floated in the Paris meeting is to divide some of the future centre's responsibilities among several sites.

The other unresolved question is how much the system will cost.

Countries also expressed their eagerness to set up tsunami warning systems for the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean and Mediterranean seas, Bernal said. China and the Philippines especially urged the creation of a system for the South China Sea.

Plans for the Caribbean were coincidentally already far ahead before the December 26 catastrophe, and Mediterranean countries are already enthusiastic about a regional scheme, said Reid Basher, a senior advisor at the UN's International Strategy for Disaster Reduction.

But he emphasised that, in any region, technology was only one part of the solution.

"Countries still have to get the educational issue resolved," he said, pointing to the need for countries to have an effective national alert system and train citizens to respond to it.

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