Trapped waves of the 27 November 1945 Makran tsunami: observations and numerical modeling

S. Neetu (), I. Suresh (), R. Shankar (), B. Nagarajan (), R. Sharma (), S. Shenoi (), A. Unnikrishnan () and D. Sundar ()

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2011, vol. 59, issue 3, 1609-1618

Abstract: The 27 November 1945 earthquake in the Makran Subduction Zone triggered a destructive tsunami that has left important problems unresolved. According to the available reports, high waves persisted along the Makran coast and at Karachi for several hours after the arrival of the first wave. Long-duration sea-level oscillations were also reported from Port Victoria, Seychelles. On the other hand, only one high wave was reported from Mumbai. Tide-gauge records of the tsunami from Karachi and Mumbai confirm these reports. While the data from Mumbai shows a single high wave, Karachi data shows that high waves persisted for more than 7 h, with maximum wave height occurring 2.8 h after the arrival of the first wave. In this paper, we analyze the cause of these persistent high waves using a numerical model. The simulation reproduces the observed features reasonably well, particularly the persistent high waves at Karachi and the single high wave at Mumbai. It further reveals that the persistent high waves along the Makran coast and at Karachi were the result of trapping of the tsunami-wave energy on the continental shelf off the Makran coast and that these coastally-trapped edge waves were trapped in the along-shore direction within a ∼300-km stretch of the continental shelf. Sensitivity experiments establish that this along-shore trapping of the tsunami energy is due to variations in the shelf width. In addition, the model simulation indicates that the reported long duration of sea-level oscillations at Port Victoria were mainly due to trapping of the tsunami energy over the large shallow region surrounding the Seychelles archipelago. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Keywords: Tsunami; Makran subduction zone; Tide-gauge data; Coastally-trapped waves; Tsunami-hazard mitigation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11069-011-9854-0 (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:59:y:2011:i:3:p:1609-1618

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

DOI: 10.1007/s11069-011-9854-0

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 ().