New paper: A new tsunami runup predictor
On October 28th IDL researchers Martin Wronna and Maria A. Baptista, with colleague Utku Kânoğlu (Middle East Technical University, Ankara), published a new paper in Natural Hazards on predicting the tsunami runup.Tsunami runup is an important value describing the impact of a tsunami event onshore. The result of this study is a new tsunami runup predictor (TRP). The TRP, in the equation in the figure, relates the accelerating phase of the wave with the length of the beach slope the wave is travelling over for different initial waveforms. For a couple of past events, the authors demonstrate how to apply the TRP. The results compare well with the field measurements of the chosen events. Consequently, the application of the TRP could be an advance for tsunami early warning systems.Full citation: Wronna, M., Baptista, M.A. & Kânoğlu, U. A new tsunami runup predictor. Nat Hazards (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-020-04366-1Abstract: We introduce a new parameter, tsunami runup predictor (TRP), relating the accelerating phase of the wave to the length of the beach slope over which the wave is travelling. We show the existence of a relationship between the TRP and the runup for different initial waveforms, i.e. leading elevation N-waves (LENs) and leading depression N-waves (LDNs). Then, we use the TRP to estimate tsunami runup for past tsunami events. The comparison of the runup estimates against field data gives promising results. Thus, the TRP provides first-order estimates of tsunami runup once the offshore waveform is known or estimated and, therefore, it could be beneficial to be implemented in tsunami early warning systems.