Phys.org December 27, 2022
An international team of researchers (Japan, New Zealand) leveraged the world’s largest and densest tsunami observing system to develop a method for a real-time tsunami inundation prediction based on machine learning. Their method utilizes 150 offshore stations encompassing the Japan Trench to simultaneously predict tsunami inundation at seven coastal cities stretching ~100 km along the southern Sanriku coast. They trained the model using 3093 hypothetical tsunami scenarios from the megathrust (Mw 8.0–9.1) and nearby outer-rise (Mw 7.0–8.7) earthquakes. Then, the model was tested against 480 unseen scenarios and three near-field historical tsunami events. The proposed model can achieve comparable accuracy to the physics-based model with ~99% computational cost reduction, thus facilitates a rapid prediction and an efficient uncertainty quantification. The direct use of offshore observations can increase the forecast lead time and eliminate the uncertainties typically associated with a tsunami source estimate required by the conventional modeling approach…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLEÂ
Schematic of the proposed method. Credit: Nature Communications volume 13, Article number: 5489 (2022)Â