Tsunami “what-ifs”
Fortunately, the tsunami that hit Hawaii was nothing like what was feared. The experience did provide an opportunity, though, to demonstrate how easily Depiction’s flood element can simulate things like tsunami inundation and storm surges. It’s one example of a very simple but powerful tool that Depiction has–just drop a flood in the water body, input your total feet, and Depiction will calculate the extent based on the elevation data. I just used the basic 30-meter data Depiction pulls in through a quickstart, but any data type will work, and you can get higher resolution data for much of the US, at least, from the USGS Seamless website.
The story behind my post yesterday is also moderately interesting–I was out of the house all day, at a wedding and running various other errands. The only computer I had access to was a $300 netbook that had never run Depiction. I wasn’t quite sure it would work, but once I got it installed it ran beautifully, even on 1GB of RAM.
Kim Buike also put together a short little video that demonstrates a bit more of how Depiction’s flood model can be used in tsunami simulation:
about 2 months ago
Although not strictly weather related,occurences of rogue waves also known as abnormal waves are dangerous and spontaneous ocean waves that begin far out at sea, and are a threat even to ocean liners.In oceanography, they are technically defined as waves whose height is more than twice the significant wave height (SWH), this measurement is dependant on observing a series of waves to determine the largest third of waves. Therefore rogue waves are not necessarily the largest waves found at sea; they are, indeed, large waves for a given sea state.