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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 1741
Short-term Inundation Forecasting for Tsunamis in the Caribbean Sea
Region
Prof. Aurelio Mercado-Irizarry
Department of Marine Sciences University of Puerto Rico IAPSO
Wilford Schmidt
After the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the USA Congress gave a mandate to the National Oceanographic
and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to assess the tsunami threat for all USA interests, and adapt to
them the Short-term Inundation Forecasting for Tsunamis (SIFT) methodology first developed for the
USA Pacific seaboard states. This methodology would be used with the DART buoys deployed in the
Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea. The first step involved the evaluation and characterization of the
major tsunamigenic regions in both regions, work done by the US Geological Survey (USGS). This was
followed by the modeling of the generation and propagation of tsunamis due to unit slip tsunamigenic
earthquakes located at different locations along the tsunamigenic zones identified by the USGS. These
pre-computed results are stored and are used as sources (in an inverse modeling approach using the
DART buoys) for so-called Standby Inundation Models (SIMs) being developed for selected coastal cities
in Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, and others along the Atlantic seaboard of the USA. It is the
purpose of this presentation to describe the work being carried out in the Caribbean Sea region, where
two SIM's for Puerto Rico have already being prepared, allowing for near real-time assessment (less
than 10 minutes after detection by the DART buoys) of the expected tsunami impact for two major
coastal cities.
Keywords: tsunamis, caribbean, modeling