HR: 0800h
AN: U11A-0811    [Abstracts]
TI: Numerical modelling of the December 26th 2004 Sumatra tsunami using different source mechanisms
AU: Lorito, S
EM: lorito@ingv.it
AF: Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Via di Vigna Murata 605, Rome, 00143 Italy
AU: * Piatanesi, A
EM: piatanesi@ingv.it
AF: Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Via di Vigna Murata 605, Rome, 00143 Italy
AB: On December 26th, 2004 an earthquake of M=9.3 struck the Sumatra-Andaman region and generated a huge tsunami: this was the most devastating and deadly event of this type every occurred during the last centuries, causing about 300,000 fatalities and spreading destruction along the coasts of the whole Indian Ocean. The exceptional rupture extent and duration of the earthquake made difficult to retrieve the details of the whole source mechanism using classical inversion methods. Actually, several proposed source models differ in length, width, slip and rupture velocity. It has been shown in the recent literature that tsunami data, such as tide-gage records and run-up heights, are useful to constrain some parameters of the causative earthquake source. The aim of our work is to test some of the proposed source models against the available tsunami data and to eventually constrain some of the source parameters. We perform several numerical simulations of the tsunami generation and propagation: the model is based on the nonlinear shallow-water equations, solved numerically by means of a finite-difference method. We take into account the known source models to compute the initial condition for the calculations; then we compare the available data (tide-gage records, run-up heights etc.) with the corresponding synthetics. The preliminary results indicate that the tsunami data are able to constrain the spatial extent of the rupture and the slip amplitude on the fault.
DE: 0545 Modeling (4255)
DE: 4455 Nonlinear waves, shock waves, solitons (0689, 2487, 3280, 3285, 4275, 6934, 7851, DE: 7215 Earthquake source observations (1240)
DE: 7290 Computational seismology
DE: 7299 General or miscellaneous
SC: Union [U]
MN: Fall Meeting 2005