NASA tsunami research makes waves in science community

A wave of new NASA research on tsunamis has yielded an innovative method to improve existing tsunami warning systems, and a potentially groundbreaking new theory on the source of the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

In one study, published last fall in Geophysical Research Letters, researcher Y. Tony Song of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., demonstrated that real-time data from NASA's network of global positioning system (GPS) stations can detect ground motions preceding tsunamis and reliably estimate a tsunami's destructive potential within minutes, well before it reaches coastal areas.

The method could lead to development of more reliable global tsunami warning systems, saving lives and reducing false alarms.

Conventional tsunami warning systems rely on estimates of an earthquake's magnitude to determine whether a large tsunami will be generated. Earthquake magnitude is not always a reliable indicator of tsunami potential, however.

The 2004 Indian Ocean quake generated a huge tsunami, while the 2005 Nias (Indonesia) quake did not, even though both had almost the same magnitude from initial estimates. Between 2005 and 2007, five false tsunami alarms were issued worldwide.

Such alarms have negative societal and economic effects.

Song's method estimates the energy an undersea earthquake transfers to the ocean to generate a tsunami by using data from coastal GPS stations near the epicenter. With these data, ocean floor displacements caused by the earthquake can be inferred. Tsunamis typically originate at undersea boundaries of tectonic plates near the edges of continents.

Song's method works as follows: an earthquake's epicenter is located using seismometer data. GPS displacement data from stations near the epicenter are then gathered to derive seafloor motions.

Based upon these data, local topography data and new theoretical developments, a new "tsunami scale" measurement from one to 10 is generated, much like the Richter Scale used for earthquakes.

Song proposes using the scale to make a distinction between earthquakes capable of generating destructive tsunamis from those unlikely to do so.

To demonstrate his methodology on real earthquake-tsunamis, Song examined three historical tsunamis with well-documented ground motion measurements and tsunami observations: Alaska in 1964; the Indian Ocean in 2004; and Nias Island, Indonesia in 2005. His method successfully replicated all three. The data compared favorably with conventional seismic solutions that usually take hours or days to calculate.

Scientists have long believed tsunamis form from vertical deformation of seafloor during undersea earthquakes.

However, seismograph and GPS data show such deformation from the 2004 Sumatra earthquake was too small to generate the powerful tsunami that ensued. Song's team found horizontal forces were responsible for two-thirds of the tsunami's height, as observed by three satellites (NASA's Jason, the U.S. Navy's Geosat Follow-on and the European Space Agency's Environmental Satellite), and generated five times more energy than the earthquake's vertical displacements.

The horizontal forces also best explain the way the tsunami spread out across the Indian Ocean. The same mechanism was also found to explain the data observed from the 2005 Nias earthquake and tsunami.

PASADENA, California