[ad_1]
Using satellite data scientists have captured tsunamis in more detail than ever before, and this new understanding could pave the way for better and more accurate tsunami forecasting models, which could benefit coastal communities.
New revelations about the tsunami came courtesy of the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite, which was jointly launched by NASA and the French space agency Center National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) in 2022.
SWOT’s capture of the tsunami triggered by a massive 8.8 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula on July 30 this year provides a fresh, detailed glimpse of the geophysical event.
As the tsunami waves moved across the ocean, SWOT was able to detect the earthquake as early as 70 minutes after it occurred.
“The power of SWOT’s broad, paintbrush-like strokes over the ocean is to provide important real-world validation, unlocking new physics and a leap toward more accurate early warnings and a safer future,” said Nadya Vinogradova Schieffer, NASA Earth lead and SWOT program scientist.
In this case, SWOT data on tsunamis helped scientists take a multidimensional look at the leading edge of the tsunami wave generated by the Kamchatka earthquake.
The data revealed that tsunami propagation and scattering patterns were far more complex than previously thought: While tsunamis were long thought to be non-dispersive, meaning they mostly stick together as a single wave, SWOT’s data showed that the tsunami broke up as it traveled into a large leading wave and smaller trailing waves.
I think of SWOT data as a new pair of glasses. Previously, with DART we could only see tsunamis at specific points in the vastness of the ocean. There have been other satellites before, but they only saw a thin line in the tsunami at best,” the study’s lead author Angel Ruiz-Angulo was quoted as saying. science alert,
Ruiz-Angulo further explained that with SWOT, scientists can now capture high resolution data of the ocean surface over an area up to 120 kilometers wide.
How does it matter?
NASA said tsunami measurements captured by SWOT can help scientists at NOAA’s Center for Tsunami Research improve their forecast models, which, in turn, can deliver more accurate and timely alerts to coastal communities at risk from tsunamis.
The data provided by SWOT on the height, shape and direction of tsunami waves will be critical in this effort: “Satellite observations help researchers better infer the cause of tsunamis, and in this case, they also showed us that NOAA’s tsunami forecast was correct,” said Josh Willis, an oceanographer at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
[ad_2]
