On the open sea propagation of two-dimensional rotational water waves generated by a moving bed

Abstract

We study the propagation of two-dimensional tsunami waves triggered by a seaquake in the open sea in the presence of underlying wind-generated currents, corresponding to background flows of constant vorticity. A suitable scaling of the governing equations introduces dimensionless parameters, of particular interest being the setting of linear waves that only depend on the vertical movement of the sea bed. We use Fourier analysis methods to extract formulae for the function f which describes the vertical displacement of the water's free surface. We show that the results are particularly useful in the physically relevant shallow-water regime: in the irrotational case the predictions fit well with the observed behaviour of some historical tsunamis. In other situations, the stationary-phase principle gives insight into the asymptotic behaviour of f.