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Energy Decay of the 2004 Sumatra Tsunami in the World Ocean

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Abstract

The catastrophic Indian Ocean tsunami generated off the coast of Sumatra on 26 December 2004 was recorded by a large number of tide gauges throughout the World Ocean. This study uses gauge records from 173 sites to examine the characteristics and energy decay of the tsunami waves from this event in the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Findings reveal that the decay (e-folding) time of the tsunami wave energy within a given oceanic basin is not uniform, as previously reported, but depends on the absorption characteristics of the shelf adjacent to the coastal observation site and the time for the waves to reach the site from the source region. In general, the decay times for island and open-ocean bottom stations are found to be shorter than for coastal mainland stations. Decay times for the 2004 Sumatra tsunami ranged from about 13 h for islands in the Indian Ocean to 40–45 h for mainland stations in the North Pacific.

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Notes

  1. Unfortunately, there was little effort to continue records longer than 1–2 days after the first tsunami arrival; in future, this problem should be taken into account.

  2. These numbers include only those records selected for the present study; the actual number of records described in these publications is much higher but many of the records were deemed not appropriate for examination of the energy decay for the reasons mentioned above.

  3. Filtering helps us to identify tsunami waves and to isolate them; at the same time it diminishes the actual wave heights and distorts the arrival waveforms (Emery and Thomson, 2003; Candella et al., 2008). To avoid such errors, we analyzed the filtered series in combination with the residual (de-tided) series.

  4. Candella et al. (2008) listed a few known historical tsunami records in the Atlantic Ocean but all of these records were relatively poor quality analog records.

  5. As was noted above, the sampling attenuation coefficients depend on properties of individual sites and are different for different stations; the mean coefficients give only approximate correction values.

  6. GLOSS is the Global Sea Level Observing System (http://www.gloss-sealevel.org/).

  7. An even larger maximum wave height of 123 cm was recorded at Imbituba located in the same region (Melo and Rocha, 2005; Candella et al., 2008); however, this was a “pen-and-paper” analog record which was difficult to analyze. Also, Candella et al. (2008) estimated that the actual tsunami wave height at La Paloma (Uruguay) was >1.5 m but the observed signal was strongly attenuated due to the 15-min sampling.

  8. DART = Deep-ocean assessment and reporting of tsunamis is the real-time open-ocean monitoring system developed by the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, Seattle, WA (USA) for effective tsunami forecasting (http://nctr.pmel.noaa.gov/Dart/).

  9. ODP CORK = Ocean Drilling Program, Circulation Obviation Retrofit Kit is a long term seafloor observatory designed to record various geophysical and hydrophysical parameters in seabed boreholes.

  10. After this paper had originally been submitted, Modesto Ortiz (CICESE, Ensenada, Mexico) kindly sent us the entire December 2004 record for this station. The 2-min sampling interval of these data enabled us to estimate more precisely the parameters of tsunami waves at this site (Table 9). The maximum recorded wave height was 101.1 cm, very close to what we had anticipated.

  11. NeMO = New Millenium Observatory, a station with a precise BPR (the same as in DARTs), which was deployed near an active volcano located on the Juan de Fuca Ridge. The purpose of this station was to study the dynamic interactions between submarine volcanic activity and seafloor hotsprings.

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Acknowledgments

The data used in the present study were collected over more than 5 years. A great many institutions and individuals helped us search for the data. We gratefully acknowledge the following organizations for providing us with tide gauge records for the 2004 Sumatra tsunami: the University of Hawaii Sea Level Center (Honolulu, Hawaii, USA); the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (Honolulu, Hawaii, USA); The West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center (Palmer, Alaska, USA); the National Tidal Centre and Australian Antarctic Division, Australian Bureau of Meteorology (Kent Town, South Australia); the Department of Transport––Government of Western Australia (Perth, WA); Maritime Safety Queensland, Department of Transport and Main Roads (Brisbane, Queensland, Australia); the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA, Hamilton, New Zealand); the Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services (CO-OPS), National Ocean Service (NOS), the US National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration, NOAA (Seattle, Washington, and Silver Spring, Maryland), the Canadian Hydrographic Service (Sidney, British Columbia and Halifax, Nova Scotia), the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (Liverpool, UK); the Hydrographic and Oceanographic Department, the Survey of India (Delhi), and the National Institute of Oceanography (Goa, India); the Japan Coast Guard (Tokyo); the Hydrographic Office of the Republic of South Africa (Tokai, RSA); the Servicio Hidrográfico y Oceanográfico de la Armada de Chile (SHOA, Valparaíso); the Departamento de Oceanografia, Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil); the Centro de Hidrografia da Marinha (Niteroi, Brazil); the Division Oceanografía Física (Montevideo, Uruguay); and the Departamento Oceanografía, Servicio de Hidrografía (Buenos Aires, Argentina). We also thank those people who helped us obtain, assemble and verify these data; our specific thanks to Mark Merrifield (Honolulu, HI), Ruth Farre (Tokai, South Africa), Bill Mitchell (Adelaide, Australia), Mike Davis (Kent Town, Australia), Philip Woodworth (Liverpool, UK), Paul Whitmore (Palmer, AK, USA), Stuart Weinstein (Honolulu, HI, USA), Fred Stephenson, Denny Sinnott and Neil Sutherland (Sidney, BC, Canada), John Fleming, Jorge Cruz Cristóbal and Claudia Valenzuela Cuevas (Valparaíso, Chile), Tatiana Ivelskaya (Yuzhno-Skhalinsk, Russia), Kelly Stroker (Boulder, CO, USA), Marie Eble (Seattle, WA, USA), Natalia Donoho (Silver Spring, Md, USA), Modesto Ortiz (Ensenada, Mexico), K.A. Abdul Rasheed (Kochi, India), Carlos França (São Paulo, Brazil), Walter Dragani (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Ernesto Forbes (Montevideo, Uruguay), and Rosuita Roso (Niteroi, Brazil). We are most grateful for the incredible help we received from Paul Davill (Kent Town, Western Australia), Daryl Metters (Brisbane, Queensland), Derek Goring (Christchurch, NZ), and Rob Bell (Hamilton, NZ) in locating and incorporating numerous Australian and New Zealand data. We also thank Vasily Titov (PMEL/NOAA, Seattle, USA) for making available results of his numerical model, Isaac Fine (IOS, Sidney, Canada) for fruitful discussions, Maxim Krassovski (IOS, Sidney, Canada) for helping us with maps and Patricia Kimber (Sidney, Canada) for drawing the figures.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Institute of Ocean Sciences, 9860 West Saanich Road, Sidney, BC, V8L 4B2, Canada

    Alexander B. Rabinovich & Richard E. Thomson

  2. Russian Academy of Sciences, P.P. Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, 36 Nakhimovsky Pr, Moscow, 117997, Russia

    Alexander B. Rabinovich

  3. Instituto de Estudos do Mar Almirante Paulo Moreira, 253 Rua Kioto, Arraial do Cabo, RJ, 28930-000, Brazil

    Rogério N. Candella

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  1. Alexander B. Rabinovich
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Correspondence to Alexander B. Rabinovich.

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Rabinovich, A.B., Candella, R.N. & Thomson, R.E. Energy Decay of the 2004 Sumatra Tsunami in the World Ocean. Pure Appl. Geophys. 168, 1919–1950 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00024-011-0279-1

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