The major earthquake on December 26, 2004 off the coast of Northern Sumatra triggered a Tsunami that caused more than 250,000 casualties in the region. The historical tragedy revealed a need for urgent management for disaster prevention and/or relief, such as preparation of hazard maps, construction of a Tsunami warning system and education for local people in disaster response.
Right: Maximum height of Tsunami as simulated with MIKE 21 using fault model AlphaM3 (click on picture to enlarge)
Immediately following the event, DHI Water & Environment (DHI) simulated the propagation of the Tsunami wave using the global setup of the flexible mesh version of MIKE 21, with a zoom in to the areas where the greatest effects were reported during December 26 - see previous news story.
In the first months of 2005 DHI, in cooperation with our Japanese partner company Alpha Hydraulic Engineering Consultants, have been gathering information relating to both the fault parameters of the quake and the initial shape of the water level displacement, including as many observations as have been possible.
A paper, describing the use of the additional information and the advances that has been made in simulating the Asian Tsunami wave, can be downloaded from the MIKE 21 download area
2D animations of model results
Attempts have been made to find an optimum initial condition for the Tsunami to explain the observed Tsunami propagation situation well with MIKE 21 (rectangular grid version). Results from the simulations of Tsunami propagation with the best fit to observations are shown below - click on the map to view/download the animations. Dark red color is surface elevations (Tsunami wave height) above +1m and dark blue color is surface elevations below - 1m.
..across the Indian Ocean (1.5 MB) ..in the Bay of Bengal (1.3 MB) ...and around Sri Lanka (1.1 MB)
Please Note: The 2D avi animations have been created using DivX compression.
You can download the DivX driver here. To disable show DivX logo, otherwise shown on the video, see below:
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If you are interested in the modeling aspects of the simulations shown above, or are interested in different outputs, please feel free to contact: Peter Rasch ptr@dhi.dk or Erland Rasmussen ebr@dhi.dk