Dispersive tsunami waves in the ocean: Model equations and sensitivity to dispersion and Coriolis effects

By James T. Kirby, Fengyan Shi, B. Tehranirad, Jeffrey C. Harris, Stephan T. Grilli. 2013

187 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract We derive fully nonlinear, weakly dispersive model equations for propagation of surface gravity waves in a shallow, homogeneous ocean of variable depth on the surface of a rotating sphere. A numerical model is developed for the weakly nonlinear version of the model based on a combined finite-volume and finite-difference method with a fourth-order MUSCL-TVD scheme in space and a third-order SSP Runge–Kutta scheme in time. In the context of tsunami generation and propagation over trans-oceanic distances, a scaling analysis reveals that the importance of frequency dispersion increases with a decrease of the source width, while the effect of the Coriolis force increases with an increase of the source width. A sensitivity analysis to dispersive and Coriolis effects is carried out using the numerical model in a series of numerical experiments in an idealized ocean using Gaussian and di-polar sources with different source sizes. A simulation of the Tohoku 2011 tsunami is used to illustrate the effects of dispersive and Coriolis effects at large distances from the source region.

Subfields: Earth-Surface Processes, Geophysics, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/26f0040e05ea99def6fc1cf92aae03a50dbaa90c

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Earth-Surface Processes

1. Finn Løvholt
2. Geir Pedersen
3. Sylfest Glimsdal
4. Stéphane Popinet
5. C. Harbitz

In Geophysics

1. Finn Løvholt
2. Geir Pedersen
3. Sylfest Glimsdal
4. Stéphane Popinet
5. C. Harbitz

In Oceanography

1. Finn Løvholt
2. Geir Pedersen
3. Stéphane Popinet

Citations in the corpus

• Dispersion of tsunamis: does it really matter? (2013, background): “If the waves are moderately dispersive, Boussinesq models without the optical approximation are now capable of simulating the far-field tsunami propagation over transoceanic distances (see e.g. Løvholt et al. , 2008; Zhou et al. , 2011; Kirby et al., 2013).”
• A quadtree-adaptive multigrid solver for the Serre-Green-Naghdi equations (2015, background): “[22], who pointed out the importance of dispersive effects when considering propagation of the Tohoku tsunami over the entire Pacific Ocean.”