IASPEI - Picture Gallery

IUGG XXIV General Assembly July 2-13, 2007 Perugia, Italy
(S) - IASPEI - International Association of Seismology and Physics of the Earth's
Interior
JSS002 Oral Presentation 1735
Kuril Islands Tsunami of november 15, 2006. (Examination of Tsunami
enhancement at crescent city, California)
Dr. Juan Horrillo
JSS42 Historical and contemporary observations IAPSO
Zygmunt Kowalik, Williams Knight
Application of global tsunami propagation models to the Indian Ocean Tsunami of December 2004 and
to the Kuril Islands Tsunami of November 2006 shows the importance of tsunami modifications through
secondary source generation at ridges, seamounts and passages between islands or continents.
Tsunami modification depends on the strength of these secondary sources, which in turn depend on
tsunami interactions with these prominent bathymetric features. Interactions between wave fronts
derived from primary and secondary sources lead to difficulties in arrival time prediction for the largest
amplitude portion of the tsunami. These interactions make it apparent that improvements in both the
modeling techniques and the physics described in numerical models must be supported by high
resolution bathymetry. A numerical model for global tsunami propagation with spatial resolution of one
minute was applied to the Kuril Islands Tsunami of November 15, 2006. As the computational domain is
resolved with over 100 million grid points, the application was parallelized and run on a supercomputer.
Numerical results were compared to sea level data collected by Pacific DART buoys and tide gauges
along the U.S. West Coast. Numerical results were found to be highly sensitive to the spatial resolution
applied to these prominent bathymetric features. The high resolution model is applied to explain the
origin of the large-amplitude portion of the tsunami at Crescent City, California, which arrived roughly
two hours after the initial wave.
Keywords: tsunami, kuril, 2006