Tsunami Prediction & Early Warning
A natural extension of array-based EEW is to apply similar processing at larger spatial scale and longer time span for tsunami warning: use real-time back-projection to build a simple source model that feeds a tsunami simulation predicting arrival time and coastal run-up height. We demonstrated this for megathrust events including the 2011 Tohoku-Oki, 2014 Iquique, and 2015 Illapel earthquakes (An & Meng, GRL 2016), supporting warnings in regions exposed to near-field tsunami hazard.
Time-reversal imaging of tsunami sources
Traditional tsunami source inversion uses finite-fault slip modeling, which is sensitive to assumed fault parameters and crustal rigidity and is computationally heavy. Time-reversal imaging instead reconstructs the initial sea-surface elevation by back-propagating and constructively interfering the recorded tsunami waveforms (An & Meng, 2017). It needs no pre-defined fault parameters, suits events with unknown fault geometry, handles dense meshes efficiently, and can resolve small secondary sources such as submarine landslides or splay-fault ruptures. We validated it on synthetic sources and applied it to the 2014 Iquique and 2015 Illapel events.
