Three‐dimensional simulation of the electromagnetic fields induced by the 2011 Tohoku tsunami

Abstract

AbstractThe motion of seawater induces electromotive force of significant intensity due to Faraday's law, and the resulting electromagnetic (EM) field can be recorded by instruments installed on land or on the ocean bottom. However, few studies have successfully made a quantitative interpretation to obtain geophysical information from observations of tsunami‐induced EM signals by an exact and accurate application of Maxwell equations. We built a scheme for three‐dimensional numerical simulation to calculate EM fields due to ocean tidal flow and tested the system's accuracy by using the source currents in the ocean as expected from a Tohoku tsunami simulation. Here we show examples of a comparison of data from one land observatory in the Tohoku district, one island observatory in the Izu‐Bonin arc, and one seafloor station in the northwest Pacific Ocean. The water motion that generates source current in the sea consists of both the primary poloidal and toroidal magnetic modes. Our numerical simulation shows that the field of the primary toroidal magnetic mode can be effective for seafloor observations but only when the seafloor is highly conductive. We examined how the conductivity of the shallower part of the seabed, composed of sediments, can be constrained by the tsunami‐induced EM field observations, which is difficult in case of using ordinary seafloor magnetotelluric signals. We also defined the motional impedance just as the case of ordinary magnetotellurics and showed that both modeled and observed impedances approximately indicate the phase velocity of the long wave as predicted by a simple theory.