Characteristics of Tsunami Run-up around the Kido River Mouth Based on Video-Image Analysis and Numerical Experiments

Abstract

The 2011 Tohoku Earthquake Tsunami attacked the northern Pacific coast of Japan, ran up along the rivers and overflew the river levee. Video images of tsunami run-up recorded in this catastrophic event enabled us to quantitatively estimate various hydrodynamic features of tsunami and it was found that existing numerical models tend to underestimate the tsunami run-up velocity along the river. This study performed several numerical experiments and compared the results with video-image analysis around the Kido River Mouth. It was found through the analysis that discretization schemes of advection term and other computational conditions such as profiles incident tsunami and detailed geography of the river including levee are essential factors for accurate predictions of tsunami run-up along the river.