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On the Influence of Slopes, Source, Seabed and Water Column Properties on T Waves: Generation at Shore

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Abstract

The term T waves is generally associated with acoustic waves generated by seismic events that subsequently travel horizontally in the ocean at the speed of sound. In this paper, we use a time-domain spectral-element method to perform a parametric study of the influence of seafloor slope, source position and media properties for a typical (downslope) T-wave generation scenario. We find that the energy and duration of these waves are particularly sensitive to the environment. In particular, the slopes and physical characteristics of the seabed play a crucial role for both the generation and the conversion of these waves. Likewise, the depth and position of the earthquake relative to the slope is of great importance, with the presence of privileged areas for the generation of T waves, which we map.

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Notes

  1. This could happen, though, in the case of an earthquake occurring right below a volcano or a seamount, but we are not interested in these specific cases here

  2. In the case MED the reflection peak mentionned is around 22\(^{\circ }\) while in the case HIGH it is around 27\(^{\circ }\) (see Fig. 5, bottom)

  3. As the parabolic equation does not take into account back-scattered energy, they do not face the problem of multiple reflections between the slope and the symmetry axis that we mentioned and that prevented us from using axisymmetric calculations in our case.

  4. In the case of triangular signals this effective duration is equal to their actual duration.

  5. One could also think about a diffraction phenomenon on the sharp edges of the slope. Although we do observe this phenomenon in our simulations, the diffracted signals have negligible amplitude compared to the reflected ones

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Acknowledgements

D.K. would like to thank Jeroen Tromp for suggesting him to work on T waves, a long time ago. We thank also Emmanuel Le Clezio and Eric Rosenkrantz for their help in validating the reflection coefficients. We also thank Emile Okal and an anonymous reviewer for their useful comments that improved the manuscript. The Ph.D. grant of Alexis Bottero was awarded by ENS Cachan, France. This work was granted access to the French HPC resources of CINES under allocation #A0020407165 and #A0030410305, both made by GENCI, and of the Aix-Marseille Supercomputing Mesocenter under allocations #b025. We gratefully acknowledge the support of NVIDIA Corporation with the donation of hardware for this research through their Hardware Grant Request program.

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  1. Dimitri Komatitsch: Deceased January 21, 2019.

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  1. Aix Marseille Univ., CNRS, Centrale Marseille, LMA, Marseille, France

    Alexis Bottero, Paul Cristini & Dimitri Komatitsch

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Bottero, A., Cristini, P. & Komatitsch, D. On the Influence of Slopes, Source, Seabed and Water Column Properties on T Waves: Generation at Shore. Pure Appl. Geophys. 177, 5695–5711 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00024-020-02611-z

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