SO503

SO503, Spring 2011

Tsunami Lab

We will look at the arrival of the Honshu earthquake tsunami as it travelled across the Pacific. This lab will be due Tueday 29 March at 1330.

Get water height records from the assigned DART buoys (http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/dart.shtml) listed below. You will need to select the time interval and get the data into a format where you can plot it. Compute the arrival time and height of the tsunami wave. This is probably a graph and visual picking operation. You also need to get the lat/long of the buoy.

Station 21419 - 209NM SE of KURIL ISLANDS (che,min)
Station 21413 - 690 NM Southeast of Tokyo, Japan (cro,now)
Station 21418 - 450 NM NE of Tokyo, Japan (dau, pri)
Station 21414 (LLNR 984.8) - NW Pacific (har, tes)
Station 51407 (LLNR 28006.5) - 140 NM Southeast of Honolulu, HI (luc,tes)
Station 43412 - 240 NM Southwest of Manzanillo, Mexico (mil,tho)

Get the tide gauge data for the assigned tide gauges below from http://tidesonline.nos.noaa.gov/geographic.html You will want to find the preliminary data, and may have to dig around to find it. You also need to get the lat/long of the tide gauge. Your final graph should be noisy; if it looks too good to be true, you probably have the predicted tides. You need either the observed tide or the anomaly.

9412110 Port San Luis, CA (che)
9419750 Crescent City, CA (cro)
9416841 Arena Cove, CA (dau)
1617760 Hilo, HI (har)
1612340 Honolulu, HI (luc,tes)
9461380 Adak Island, AK (mil,pri)
9462450 Nikolski, AK (min,now)
9431647 Port Orford, OR (tho)

Get the time and location of the earthquake from the USGS. http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eqinthenews/2011/usc0001xgp/

Compute the travel time and average speed of the tsunami wave going to your buoy and tide gauge. Do this for three cases: a single average depth along the profile, 5 km point spacing, and 100 km spacing.

MICRODEM can do the first step of getting the depths and distances along the path. Make sure you are running version 2010.3.3 of the program, and look in the help file contents under Labs and Tutorials, Nearshore/coastal oceangraphy, Tsunami travel time.

Written requirements, all in the style of what would go into a science journal:

Write a 2-3 sentence abstract.
Write a short description of what you did. Include the web sites with the data as a citation in the correct scientific format, and do not include the gory details of Matlab, Excel, or MICRODEM. Your methods should be clear so someone else could use their choice of programs to replicate the results.
Write a short description of your results, with the following figures and tables.
- Have two figures showing the water level and how you picked the tsunami arrival at the two locations. Discuss any ambiguity if you are unsure when the tsunami arrived. This should be concise and clear.
- Have one or two maps showing the arrival of the tsunami wave at your locations. This should be concise and clear.
- Include a table showing your computed results. (arrival times and how long it took, compared to the actual times)
Discuss how well the rhumb line computation does at predicting the arrival of the tsunami at your two locations. Compare it to just getting the distance and average depth along the profile, and using the shallow water wave equation.
Reference list for the sources of your data.

You will save your results as three HTML files, and display them in Google Earth (directions in MICRODEM under "Putting HTML into KML display"). You will will save this as a single KMZ file, and submit it for grading.

Your full report at the location of the epicenter.
The figure of the tide gauge record, and your summary table, at the location of the tide gauge.
The figure of the DART bouy record, and your summary table, at the location of the bouy.

Tsunami links: