Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
and a 1-min digital atlas (GEBCO, British Oceanographic Data Centre, http://
www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/gebco/). For some regions data are available with a
significantly improved space resolution, for example, like in the NGDC Tsunami
Inundation Gridding Project (http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/inundation/tsunami/).
In run-up simulation it may turn out to be useful to take advantage of 3 arc second
data, obtained by the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM). SRTM success-
fully collected data over 80% of the Earth's land surface, for all the area between
60 N and 56 S latitude. The data are available at the site http://seamless.usgs.gov/.
At present, many numerical tsunami models have been developed that are based
on the theory of long waves. Not claiming to present a full list, we shall only present
several of the actively applied models.
The first model is 'MOST' (Method Of Splitting Tsunami), developed by
V. V. Titov, a graduate of the Novosibirsk university, who is presently with the Pa-
cific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) at Seattle (USA). Detailed infor-
mation on the model is to found in [Titov, Synolakis (1995), (1998); Titov, Gonzalez
(1997)] and [Titov et al. (2003)].
A widely renowned model is 'TUNAMI-N2' [Goto et al. (1997)]. Among
specialists it is often called the Shuto (Shuto N.) model or the Imamura (Imamura F.)
model, in spite of the fact that the initial version was developed by T. Takahashi
[Takahashi et al. (1995)]. The model has been recommended by UNESCO for tsu-
nami calculations, and nowadays it is applied in many countries. The first numerical
simulation of the 2004 Indonesian tsunami, performed in Russia, made use of a soft-
ware complex, that represented an improved version of TUNAMI-N2 [Zaitsev et al.
(2005)].
The Zigmund Kowalik (Kowalik Z.) model, modified by Elena Troshina-Suleimani
[Suleimani et al. (2003); Kowalik et al. (2005)], was developed at the Geophysical
Institute of the Alaska University (Geophysical Institute University of Alaska Fair-
banks).
The Antonio Baptista model [Myers, Baptista (1995)], based on realization of
the method of finite elements, represents a modified version of the ADCIRC model
of storm surges.
We shall further touch upon certain results of numerical simulation of the In-
donesian catastrophic tsunami, that took place on December 26, 2004. The example
of this tsunami will be used in describing characteristic features of tsunami wave
propagation for demonstrating the possibilities of modern numerical models. We
shall mainly adhere to results, obtained in [Titov et al. (2005)].
The tsunami of December 26, 2004, happened to be the first global event,
for which there were high-quality measurements of the level supplemented with
data from satellite altimeters. The first instrumental measurement of this tsunami ap-
peared 3 h after the earthquake—the wave was registered by a station on the Coconut
islands (Fig. 5.9) at about 1,700 km from the epicentre. According to these data,
the first wave was only 30 cm high. The first wave was followed by prolonged level
oscillations with a maximum amplitude not exceeding 53 cm. At the same time, at
a number of coastal sites of India and Sri Lanka, located at approximately the same
distance, waves ten times higher than on the Coconut islands were registered. Such
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