Estimation of coastal tsunami height and arrival time at Kalpakkam

After the devastation of the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, there is an increased emphasis on tsunami wave modeling for disaster management studies. In this work, a new approach of estimation of coastal tsunami height is proposed and tested for the locations around Kalpakkam. The proposed methodology uses uniformly spaced coarse meshes throughout the domain to calculate the nearshore deep sea wave height and then correlates it with the corresponding coastal tsunami height of a beach. Thus, the proposed method is simple and computationally economical. The method is successfully tested for three stations (Vizag, Chennai, Nagapattinam) around Kalpakkam for which reliable data sets of historical events are available. Next, a sensitivity analysis study is carried out to estimate the impact of a number of fault parameters on coastal tsunami amplitude and wave arrival time at Kalpakkam. Results show that though all the important fault parameters like slip, rake angle, dip angle, focal depth influence the coastal tsunami height, the slip value has the largest impact. It is also noted that while the tsunami waves arrive more rapidly at this coast with an increase of slip, dip angle and rake angle, they slow down with the increasing focal depth value.