Experimental Study of Tsunami Generation by Three-Dimensional Rigid Underwater Landslides

By F. Enet, Stephan T. Grilli. 2007

235 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Large scale, three-dimensional, laboratory experiments are performed to study tsunami generation by rigid underwater landslides. The main purpose of these experiments is to both gain insight into landslide tsunami generation processes and provide data for subsequent validation of a three-dimensional numerical model. In each experiment a smooth and streamlined rigid body slides down a plane slope, starting from different initial submergence depths, and generates surface waves. Different conditions of wave nonlinearity and dispersion are generated by varying the model slide initial submergence depth. Surface elevations are measured with capacitance gauges. Runup is measured at the tank axis using a video camera. Landslide acceleration is measured with a microaccelerometer embedded within the model slide, and its time of passage is further recorded at three locations down the slope. The repeatability of experiments is very good. Landslide kinematics is inferred from these measurements and an analytic law of motion is derived, based on which the slide added mass and drag coefficients are computed. Characteristic distance and time of slide motion, as well as a characteristic tsunami wavelength, are parameters derived from these analyses. Measured wave elevations yield characteristic tsunami amplitudes, which are found to be well predicted by empirical equations derived in earlier work, based on two-dimensional numerical computations. The strongly dispersive nature and directionality of tsunamis generated by underwater landslides is confirmed by wave measurements at gauges. Measured coastal runup is analyzed and found to correlate well with initial slide submergence depth or characteristic tsunami amplitude.

Subfields: Civil and Structural Engineering, Geophysics, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e80f623ac05c825f8d6cad1af6ac6abd10e348bd

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Citations in the corpus

Numerical Simulation of the 2011 Tohoku Tsunami Based on a New Transient FEM Co-seismic Source: Comparison to Far- and Near-Field Observations (2013, methodology): “MA et al. (2012) have validated the SMF aspect of the model performance in comparison to laboratory data for highly dispersive conditions presented by ENET and GRILLI (2007).”
Shock-capturing non-hydrostatic model for fully dispersive surface wave processes (2012, methodology): “Experiments have recently been performed by Enet and Grilli (2007) in a 3.7 m wide, 1.8 m deep and 30 m long wave tank with a plane underwater slope with h = 15 angle.”
Tsunamis generated by landslides at the coast of conical islands: experimental benchmark dataset for mathematical model validation (2016, background): “Then, Watts et al. (2005) indicate that semi-elliptical shaped rigid body represents the worst case scenarios, at least for underwater landslides (Di Risio et al. 2009a, b; Enet and Grilli 2007; Watts 2000).”
Numerical modeling of tsunami waves generated by the flank collapse of the Cumbre Vieja Volcano (La Palma, Canary Islands): Tsunami source and near field effects (2012, methodology): “Finally, at the time this work was performed, a fully nonlinear version of FUNWAVE-TVD was only available for Cartesian grids, while the spherical implementation was only weakly nonlinear.”
Numerical simulation of tsunami waves generated by deformable submarine landslides (2013, methodology): “The slide motion is prescribed based on the dynamic force balance, which is given by Enet and Grilli (2007). The displacement of the rigid landslide is described as”
Physical modeling of tsunamis generated by three‐dimensional deformable granular landslides (2012, methodology): “with 2-D flume experiments of Kamphuis and Bowering [1970], Huber [1980], Fritz et al. [2004], Heller and Hager [2010], and Ataie-Ashtiani and Nik-Khah [2008].”