GRACE gravitational measurements of tsunamis after the 2004, 2010, and 2011 great earthquakes

Khosro Ghobadi-Far*, Shin Chan Han, Sébastien Allgeyer, Paul Tregoning, Jeanne Sauber, Saniya Behzadpour, Torsten Mayer-Gürr, Nico Sneeuw, Emile Okal

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

25 Scopus citations

Abstract

The 2004 Sumatra, 2010 Maule, and 2011 Tohoku great earthquakes triggered tsunamis as large as a few decimeters over a few 100 km in the open ocean. The transient ocean mass redistribution propagating as tsunamis changed the Earth’s gravity field enough to perturb the GRACE satellites’ orbits at ~ 500 km above the surface. The on-board microwave ranging system detected inter-satellite acceleration anomalies of up to 1.0–4.0 nm/s2. There is good agreement between GRACE measurements and tsunami models for the three events. Complementarily to buoys, ocean bottom pressure sounders, and satellite altimeters, GRACE is sensitive to the long-wavelength spatial scale of tsunamis and provides an independent source of information for assessing alternate early earthquake and tsunami models. Our study demonstrates an innovative way of applying GRACE and GRACE Follow-On data to detect transient geophysical mass changes which cannot be observed by the conventional monthly Level-2 and mascon solutions.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number65
JournalJournal of Geodesy
Volume94
Issue number7
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 1 2020

Funding

This work was funded by The University of Newcastle to support NASA’s GRACE and GRACE Follow-On projects as an international science team member to the missions and by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant (DP170100224). Science team funding was provided by NASA (GRACERFO19-0010) to Jeanne Sauber. Tsunami simulations were undertaken with the assistance of the resources and services from the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), Project tz21, which is supported by the Australian Government. This work was funded by The University of Newcastle to support NASA’s GRACE and GRACE Follow-On projects as an international science team member to the missions and by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant (DP170100224). Science team funding was provided by NASA (GRACERFO19-0010) to Jeanne Sauber. Tsunami simulations were undertaken with the assistance of the resources and services from the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), Project tz21, which is supported by the Australian Government.

Keywords

  • Earthquake
  • GRACE
  • GRACE Follow-On
  • LOS gravity difference
  • Transient signals
  • Tsunami

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Geophysics
  • Geochemistry and Petrology
  • Computers in Earth Sciences

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