GSA Annual Meeting in Seattle, Washington, USA - 2017

Paper No. 377-6
Presentation Time: 9:00 AM-6:30 PM

TSUNAMI SOURCE INVERSION BASED ON TSUNAMI WAVEFORMS, TSUNAMI INUNDATION AREA AND TSUNAMI DEPOSITS SPATIAL DISTRIBUTION: TAKE THE 2011 TOHOKU-OKI TSUNAMI AS AN EXAMPLE


TANG, Hui, Department of Geosciences, University of Arizona, Tuscon, AZ 85721, huitang@email.arizona.edu

Population living close to coastlines is increasing, which creates higher risks due to a tsunami. Earthquake-induced tsunami is one of the most dangerous hazards in the coastal zone worldwide. However, the generation of a tsunami by a megathrust earthquake is not fully understood yet. Tsunami wave field information is valuable for inferring the tsunamigenic earthquake slip distribution. Meanwhile, water inundation areas due to the tsunami usually are well documented by post-tsunami field survey. Tsunami deposits are one of the concrete evidence in the geological record which we can apply for estimating paleo-earthquake displacement. Here we present a new inverse approach with the Ensemble Kalman Filtering method (EnKF) to estimate the slip distribution based on comparing different tsunami sources proposed by different research groups. GeoClaw-STRICHE will be used as a forward model in this approach to simulate the tsunami and sediment transport during the tsunami. While more computationally expensive, our method potentially provides more accurate reconstructions for tsunami source. Our method will be tested on the 2011 Tohoku-Oki tsunami on the Sendai plain area. The results from the EnKF method will be compared to the results from Gusman et al., 2012 and MacInnes et al., 2013.