Synthesizing sea surface height change including seismic waves and tsunami using a dynamic rupture scenario of anticipated Nankai trough earthquakes

The development of offshore observation technology will provide researchers with tsunami records from within an earthquake focal area, but this will create new problems. Because seismic waves coexist with tsunami inside a focal area, the seismic waves could act as noise for the tsunami signal. This study shows an efficient method to calculate sea surface height change caused by an earthquake including both seismic waves and tsunami. Simulation results indicate that seismic waves overlap with tsunami; both affect the change in sea surface height although most previous tsunami studies have neglected the contribution of seismic waves. We also numerically simulated the sea-surface displacement wavefield and hypothesized results for an anticipated rupture scenario of a huge earthquake that may possibly occur in the Nankai Trough, Japan. The synthesized record could be used to evaluate the performance of a real-time tsunami prediction method. Additionally, we discussed the similarity and difference between two kinds of tsunami waveforms: the displacement of the sea surface and the pressure change at the sea bottom. Although seismic waves appeared in both waveforms, the contribution of seismic waves was lower in the displacement at the sea surface than in the pressure change at the sea bottom.

This is an open access article under the CC BY license(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).