MEE18708

Laura Alexandra GONZALEZ RODRIGUEZ

Supervisor: Shunichi KOSHIMURA

Country: Colombia

Abstractfulltext

We evaluated the possible locations of Bottom Pressure Recorders (BPR), which provide proper time to issue tsunami warning to the populated areas in the north pacific coast of Colombia. We made a preliminary analysis assuming an arrangement parallel to the subduction trench and then an improvement considering the technical recommendations given by the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory regarding the deployment of BPR. With the final arrangement of BPRs, we conducted Tsunami Travel Times (TTT) calculations for far-field events, and tsunami propagation simulation with TUNAMI code. Furthermore, we evaluated the effectiveness of BPR in case of local earthquakes. We classified the possible locations into three groups according to the lead time between tsunami detection on the BPR and the arrival to the first virtual observation point near the most populated areas, as: (1) best, (2) good and (3) not good. We found the best location for the selected arrangement of BPR in latitude 4.909° N, longitude 80.06° W, at the depth of 3,134 meters.   Keywords: Tsunami, Bottom Pressure Recorder, Tsunami Buoy (DART), TTT, TUNAMI.