Tsunami forecast modeling for Turkish coastlines


Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Mühendislik Fakültesi, Havacılık ve Uzay Mühendisliği Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2014

Öğrenci: NAEIMEH SHARGHIVAND

Danışman: UTKU KANOĞLU

Özet:

Turkish coastlines have been exposed to devastating tsunamis in the past. Today, Turkey has densely populated shorelines with substantial touristic activities and critical infrastructures along its shorelines. Tsunami propagation database and tsunami forecast models for the coastal communities are the two major components of the tsunami forecasting methodology which is developed by the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Center for Tsunami Research (NCTR) at the Pacifi c Marine Environmental Laboratory, Seattle, Washington. Tsunami forecast models take input from the propagation database and estimate coastal fl ooding through three nested grids in real-time. This approach expedites substantially the time required for tsunami forecast for the target shorelines. Thus, following the NCTR's approach, a tsunami propagation database has been previously developed in the Aegean Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean to help capacity building in both long-term (such as inundation mapping) and short-term (real-time) tsunami forecasting capabilities in the region. Here, modeling grids are developed for the town of Fethiye, Muğla, Turkey using publicly available bathymetric and topographic data. Then, forecast model has been developed for Fethiye using the Community Modeling Interface for Tsunamis (ComMIT), which is an interface to the validated and verifi ed tsunami numerical model of the Method of Splitting Tsunami (MOST) and the propagation database. The Fethiye forecast model has been tested extensively, and it shows stability. However, results of the forecast model need to be compared with the model results based on high resolution bathymetric and topographic data. This would be the only way to verify the accuracy of the model which is developed here.