Chilean Tsunami

Numerical simulation of the February 2010 Chilean Tsunami for the West Coast of Canada. This animation was generated by the Institute of Ocean Sciences Tsunami Numerical Model developed by Dr. Isaac Fine under contract to Dr. Richard Thomson of Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans Institute of Ocean Science.

The model is a "regional tsunami model" based on the equations of motion for linear shallow water waves and specified forcing at the oceanic boundary of the model domain. For this particular run, the model was forced using the NEPTUNE BPR 1027S sea level record spanning the period 21:24UTC February 27 to 02:15UTC February 28, 2010. The model has a 2400 x 2800 grid domain (latitude 47º N-51º N; longitude 129º W-122º W) with a corresponding grid spacing of approximately 180 m x 160 m. The sea level simulation for the British Columbia coast covers a duration of 6 hours and includes the initial propagation of the tsunami waves into the Strait of Georgia from the south via Juan de Fuca Strait and from the north via Johnstone Strait. The difference between the model and the observations is least at NEPTUNE site 1027S since the model is initialized using sea level elevations from this location. Both incoming and reflected waves appear in the simulation; dark blue denotes wave crests and bright white wave troughs. Incoming waves are strongly affected by refraction over the continental slope and shelf, causing the waves to become increasingly parallel to the shoreline as they approach the coast. The reflected waves along the outer coast are much more complicated than the incoming waves due to the added effects of topographic and coastline scattering.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• tsunami
• simulation
• modeling
• canada
• Chile
• earthquake
• mobile

[dawson2089]

oh em gee!!!!