Dispersive Study on Tsunami Propagation of The Indian Ocean Tsunami , 26 December 2004

The Indian Ocean Tsunami (IOT) 26 December 2004 is the most devastating tsunami recorded in history causing over than 200,000 deaths and millions homeless people, uncounted property and infrastructure damaged along the coasts of Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives. Many lessons can be inferred for this case, one of interesting phenomena is the dispersive effect on tsunami propagation is remarkable. Numerical simulations of IOT are conducted here to investigated the effect of dispersion by using weakly nonlinear dispersive Boussinesq (WNB) model and nonlinear shallow water (NLSW) model. Predictor-corrector scheme is used for time integration and high-order finite difference schemes are used for spatial derivatives of the model equations. Simulation results of the two models are compared each other and against recorded data from selected locations to study the dispersive effect. The dispersion effect reduced over than 20% of maximum wave height at some areas of maximum deep water. Very well agreements between WNB and NLSW model at the east areas of tsunami source are obtained by model simulations. However, the NLSW model is very attractive and quite reliable for practical purpose because it has low computation cost and gives consistent results. General features of tsunami wave patterns show a good agreement compared to observations data. Tsunami arrival time and maximum runup are also well predicted by the models.