WASHINGTON — Six buoys that are positioned to provide critical tsunami forecasting to Hawaii and other regions are out of order, and set to be repaired in the coming months.

But federal officials say redundancies built into the network of 39 specialized buoys mean the outage has not affected scientists’ ability to predict a tsunami.

“This does not keep the warning center from doing a tsunami warning if there was an earthquake,” said Kathleen O’Neil, deputy director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Buoy Data Center. “They just don’t get to narrow down the areas that might be impacted by a tsunami.”

The network of DART buoys — short for Deep Ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis — spans the world’s oceans. The system connects surface buoys to deep-ocean buoys that communicate with one another and send real-time data, via satellite, to scientists tracking them. O’Neil says many broken buoys have been fixed in the past month. The buoys that are still not working include:

• Two near Guam
• Two south of Guam, near Samoa
• One in the Gulf of Mexico
• One off the coast of Mexico

Even without those buoys working, O’Neil says, an ocean-wide tsunami warning would still be issued. But there may be more uncertainty about the extent to which specific areas would be affected.

Rep. Colleen Hanabusa appeared to have confidence in the system’s redundancies, but noted that the broken buoys are still a concern for Hawaii.

“The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center gets its data from these buoys,” she said. “We’ve had two of the most critical ones completely down. Those two are critical to us: One of the Aleutian Islands and one is between Japan and Hawaii.”

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center could not be reached for comment on Tuesday, and O’Neil said its staffers would be best equipped to handle questions about the extent to which the outages affect the accuracy of wave predictions.

O’Neil says engineers service buoys in the DART network every year, as outages are inevitable in the rough ocean environment.

“They’re in some very severe environments that tend to stress the moorings,” O’Neil said. “The severe weather, a lot of ships have collisions with our buoys at times. We find nets and other kind of fishing gear wrapped around our buoys, interference as well as acts of God.”

The volatile environment also makes it difficult to service broken buoys. O’Neil says crews have to wait until winter ends before voyaging into the Northern Pacific. The once-a-year-shot means that if a buoy stops working shortly after the expedition, it won’t be fixed until the same time the next year.

Plus, fixing DART buoys is expensive. O’Neil’s division gets about $12 million a year, half of which she says is spent just chartering the boat required for the yearly repair expedition.

“More (buoys) would certainly provides more redundancy,” O’Neil said. “They are very difficult to service and very costly to service. More stations that provide a little bit of redundancy would be helpful. There’s a fairly dense network now, and we do have some outages… but 85 percent of them are working.”