Tsunamis: bridging science, engineering and society

Abstract

Tsunamis are high-impact, long-duration disasters that in most cases allow for only minutes of warning before impact. Since the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, there have been significant advancements in warning methodology, pre-disaster preparedness and basic understanding of related phenomena. Yet, the trail of destruction of the 2011 Japan tsunami, broadcast live to a stunned world audience, underscored the difficulties of implementing advances in applied hazard mitigation. We describe state of the art methodologies, standards for warnings and summarize recent advances in basic understanding, and identify cross-disciplinary challenges. The stage is set to bridge science, engineering and society to help build up coastal resilience and reduce losses.

Understanding the Extreme Tsunami Inundation in Onagawa Town by the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake, Its Effects in Urban Structures and Coastal Facilities

“…The shallow water equations, which comprise a two-dimensional (2D) approximation of the three-dimensional (3D) Navier-Stokes equations, repeatedly showed sufficiently robust to adequately simulate the coastal effect of tsunami inundation 1640013-3 [Synolakis et al, 2008;Nicolsky et al, 2010;Synolakis and Kanoglu, 2015;Kanolu et al, 2015]. Tohoku University's numerical analysis model for the investigation of the Near-Field Tsunami No.…”

Run-up of nonlinear long waves in U-shaped bays of finite length: analytical theory and numerical computations

“…The 2-D nonlinear shallow water theory is commonly used to predict the propagation of long waves in the ocean and the subsequent inundation of coastal areas (Synolakis and Bernard 2006;Kanoglu et al 2015). The classical 2-D nonlinear shallow water wave equations are the system…”

Near- and far-field tsunami waves, displaced water volume, potential energy and velocity flow rates by a stochastic submarine earthquake source model

“…Recent catastrophic tsunami events 30 caused by submarine earthquakes such as the Sumatran earthquake and tsunami, December 26, 2004(Ioualalen et al 2007Song et al 2008;Satake 2014) and the 2011 Tohoku-Oki earthquake and tsunami (Suppasri et al 2013;Goda and Song 2015;Bai et al 2015) will be remembered for its fierceness, destruction and unprecedented loss of life for a long time. Since these destructive tsunami events, efforts have been made in warning methodology, pre-disaster preparedness and basic understanding of related phenomena to help building up coastal resilience and reducing 35 losses (Kânoğlu et al 2015). One of the greatest uncertainties in both deterministic and probabilistic hazard assessments of tsunamis is computing sea floor deformation.…”