Japan quake K-Net data to be available this week

The Kyoshin K-Net earthquake monitoring network in Japan was knocked offline by the huge earthquake and tsunami on the 11th March. As a result some of the data required to calculate whether any of the Japan quake exposed catastrophe bonds were triggered was not available and this has hindered efforts to calculate index values against which cat bonds are measured.

Some of the cat bond deals use K-Net data as their measurement reference. The network went offline and only started supplying new data reliably on the 15th March. However, sources said that the data was incomplete and some of the reporting stations were not listed anymore.

Reuters has reported here that the data will be available early this week. They quote an official from the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention in Japan as saying that no data was lost as the monitoring stations recorded and stored data. Power blackouts reportedly prevented the monitoring stations from sending data to the main centre and that explains the missing recordings after the network came back online. He is reported to have said that the data can be trusted.