CEE C.C. Mei Distinguished Speaker Series - Professor Costas Synolakis - THE FRONTIERS OF TSUNAMI HYDRODYNAMICS

In this lecture I will discuss the state of the art in tsunami hydrodynamics, referencing specific field events. Six years after the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant accident, we now understand the unfortunate design and regulatory decisions - from the coastal engineering perspective - which doomed the plant. The onland field measurements and the data from deep-ocean transducers from Japan have triggered several basic questions such as the development of tsunami hydrographs, understanding the sequencing of tsunami waves (why the first wave arrival is not always the largest) and the generation of large scale turbulent coherent structures close tsunami inflow and outflow in inlets and breakwaters. I will end by assessing how much (or little) applied tsunami hazard mitigation has changed in the past decade, despite sometimes spectacular advances in numerical modeling.