** Progress in Earth and Planetary Science is the official journal of the Japan Geoscience Union, published in collaboration with its 51 society members.
** Progress in Earth and Planetary Science is partly financially supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Publication of Scientific Research Results to enhance dissemination of information of scientific research.
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Interdisciplinary research
Measuring offshore tsunami currents using ship navigation records
Inazu D, Ikeya T, Waseda T, Hibiya T, Shigihara Y
Tsunami current, Automatic identification system (AIS), Navigating ship
(a) Ship distributions derived from AIS records 24 min after the 2011 Tohoku tsunami generation. (b) Heading normal components of ship velocities derived from the AIS data (green) and of simulated tsunami velocities (red).
We investigated ship navigation records known as Automatic Identification System (AIS) data near the source region of the 2011 Tohoku, Japan, tsunami. The AIS data of 16 ships in the offshore navigation could be compiled by about 40 minutes after the tsunami generation. Most of the AIS data showed notable deviation of the ship heading from the course over ground during the tsunami passage. There was good agreement in terms of amplitude/phase between the ship velocity and the simulated tsunami velocity in the direction normal to the ship heading. An equation of motion due to wave drag and inertia forces was examined for an offshore movable floating body. We explain that the ship movement in the direction normal to the heading immediately responds to the tsunami current, and relative velocity between the ship and the tsunami current asymptotically become zero. This indicates the movement velocity of navigating ships in the direction normal to the heading derived from AIS data will work as an offshore tsunami current meter. We examined the AIS data during the 2011 Tohoku tsunami, and showed these data could be useful for tsunami source estimation and forecast. The AIS data in the current framework will possibly be a crowd-sourced tool for monitoring offshore tsunami current and tsunami forecast.
