Tsunami simulations on a global scale

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2025-01-15 11:01

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Tsunami that cross the world can cause significant damage on distant coasts, but a team of Indian researchers has tested a new approach that could find danger spots in real time. They took a real–time shallow water model that breaks the seafloor down into smaller bits to calculate how a tsunami behaves, and applied it on a global scale using chunks of up to 20 km in the deep ocean, and finer resolutions of 2 km in shallower seas, where tsunami waves become more complex. They modelled five historical tsunami using data on the earthquakes that caused them, finding a good match between the modelled wave heights at different locations and the actual measurements from tide gauges. The researchers say that while there’s more work to be done, such simulations could be used in real-time for identifying coastal danger zones during global tsunami.