Far-Field Tsunami Potential and a Real-Time Forecast System for the Pacific Using the Inversion Method

Nobuaki Koike, Yoshiaki Kawata and Fumihiko Imamura

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2003, vol. 29, issue 3, 425-436

Abstract: Estimating tsunami potential is anessential part of mitigating tsunami disasters. Weproposed a new method to estimate the far-fieldtsunami potential by assuming faultmodels on the Pacific Rim. We find thata tsunami that generates in the areas wherethere is no tsunami in the history can damagethe Japanese coast. This shows that it isimportant to estimate tsunami potential byassuming fault models other than the pastearthquake data. Another important activity to mitigate tsunamidisasters is to provide appropriatewarnings to coastal communities when dangerfrom a tsunami is imminent. We applied anew inversion method using wavelet transformto a part of the real-time tsunami forecastsystem for the Pacific. Because this inversionmethod does not require fault location, it ispossible to analyze a tsunami in real timewithout all seismic information. In order tocheck the usability of the system, anumerical simulation was executed assuming anearthquake at sea off Taiwan. The correlationcoefficient for the estimated initialwaveform to the assumed one was calculatedto be 0.78. It takes 90 min to capturetime-series waveform data from tsunamigauges and 5 sec to estimate the 2-D initialwaveform using the inversion method. After that,it takes 2 minutes to forecast thetsunami heights at the Japanese coast. Since thesum of these times is less than the 105minutes transit time of the tsunami fromTaiwan to Japan, it is possible to give a warningto the residents before the tsunami attacksthe Japanese coast. Comparing the tsunamiheights forecasted by this system with thosecalculated by the fault model, the averageerror was 0.39 m. The average error ofthe arrival time was 0.007 min. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2003

Keywords: far-field tsunami; potential; forecast system; real-time; inversion method (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1023/A:1024760026596 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:nathaz:v:29:y:2003:i:3:p:425-436

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11069

DOI: 10.1023/A:1024760026596

Access Statistics for this article

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards is currently edited by Thomas Glade, Tad S. Murty and Vladimír Schenk

More articles in Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards from Springer, International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().