QUANTIFYING THE PERCEPTION OF THE 2011 TOHOKU TSUNAMI THROUGH COMPARISON OF MEDIA REPORTS AND TIDE GAUGE DATA

The 2011 Tohoku tsunami is one of the instrumentally most well recorded tsunami in the past century. Additionally, rapid global communication of the tsunami’s impending arrival at far-field locations allowed for not only mitigation of hazard, but broad human observation of the incoming wavetrain. We seek to combine these unique data sets by analyzing tide gauge records of the 2011 Tohoku tsunami with far-field observations obtained from local media outlets to quantify the effect of tsunami wave height on human perceptibility. Our goal is to provide a bridge between quantitative tsunami model output and qualitative tsunami observation that will help to inform hazard mitigation for tsunami in the far-field. Our results could be combined with future numerical tsunami modeling to provide a sense of a tsunami’s hazard to locations in the far-field or, additionally, these results could be combined with historical reports of far-field tsunami inundation to help provide constraints on tsunami wave amplitude from historical tsunami events.