Real-time forecasting of the April 11, 2012 Sumatra tsunami
Abstract
The April 11, 2012, magnitude 8.6 earthquake off the northern coast of Sumatra generated a tsunami that was recorded at sea-level stations as far as 4800 km from the epicenter and at four ocean bottom pressure sensors (DARTs) in the Indian Ocean. The governments of India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Maldives issued tsunami warnings for their coastlines. The United States' Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC) issued an Indian Ocean-wide Tsunami Watch Bulletin in its role as an Interim Service Provider for the region. Using an experimental real-time tsunami forecast model (RIFT), PTWC produced a series of tsunami forecasts during the event that were based on rapidly derived earthquake parameters, including initial location and Mwp magnitude estimates and the W-phase centroid moment tensor solutions (W-phase CMTs) obtained at PTWC and at the U. S. Geological Survey (USGS). We discuss the real-time forecast methodology and how successive, real-time tsunami forecasts using the latest W-phase CMT solutions improved the accuracy of the forecast.
Additional Information
This paper is not subject to U.S. copyright. Published in 2012 by the American Geophysical Union. Received 13 July 2012; revised 24 August 2012; accepted 24 August 2012; published 2 October 2012. We thank Laura Kong for her support throughout the RIFT development. We thank George Choy of USGS for helpful comments. We thank Dominique Reymond and an anonymous reviewer for their constructive comments and suggestions, which helped improve the paper. The Editor thanks Dominique Reymond and an anonymous reviewer for assisting in the evaluation of this paper.Attached Files
Published - 2012GL053081.pdf
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- CaltechAUTHORS:20121109-143516932
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2012-11-13Created from EPrint's datestamp field
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2021-11-09Created from EPrint's last_modified field
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