Development of early warning system for tsunamis accompanied by collapse of Anak Krakatau volcano, Indonesia

Abstract

Present tsunami warning systems have been specialized for earthquake-generated tsunamis, but rapidly evaluating the tsunamis caused by volcanic eruptions and/or volcanic sector collapses remains a challenge. In this study, we applied a numerical model to the 2018 Anak Krakatau tsunami event, which was generated by the sector collapse, investigated a tsunami prediction skill by the model, and developed a real-time forecasting method based on a pre-computed database for future tsunamis accompanied by such eruption of Anak Krakatau. The database stores spatiotemporal changes in water surface level and flux, which are simulated under various collapse scenarios, for confined areas in the vicinity of potential source. The areas also cover the locations of observation stations that are virtually placed on uninhabited island surrounding the source area. During an actual volcanic tsunami event, a tsunami is expected to be observed at the observation stations. For real-time tsunami forecasting, the most suitable scenarios to reproduce the observed waveforms are searched quickly in the database. The precomputed results under the identified scenarios are further provided as input for rapid tsunami propagation simulation. Therefore, an effective real-time forecasting can be conducted to densely populated coastal areas located at a considerable distance from the source, such as the coasts of Java and Sumatra. The forecasting performance was examined by applying the method for three hypothetical collapse scenarios assuming different sliding directions. We demonstrated that the tsunamis along the coasts were successfully forecasted. Moreover, we showed that the combination of a pre-computed database and the existence of observation stations near the source area was able to produce appropriate tsunami forecasting for the coastal area even in a volcanic event.