Oregon Sea Grant

Community Resilience to Coastal Hazards and Climate Change

Coastal Effects of Tsunamis

Harry Yeh
School of Civil and Construction Engineering
Oregon State University
220 Owen Hall
Corvallis, OR 97331-3212
Phone: 541-737-8057
Fax: 541-737-3052
Email
On the Web:
Dr. Yeh's Lab

Accurate tsunami evacuation maps are crucial for tsunami preparation. The maps are the basis for evacuation planning, land-use management, assessment of buildings and infrastructure, and are also used for education and tsunami-hazard awareness. Accurate evacuation maps must be made by physics-based inundation models capable of predicting tsunami effects accurately. A recent NOAA memorandum implies that the current state of inundation modeling is far from satisfactory.

Dr. Yeh’s project seeks to address this problem by exploring the fundamental mechanisms of local anomalies and tsunami amplifications that arise from the effects of complex local bathymetry (submerged landforms) and river outflows, and will advance predictability of current inundation models.

This project will provide a better understanding of tsunami hydrodynamics, thereby advancing inundation-modeling predictability, which will lead to significant improvements in tsunami evacuation maps. Outcomes from this research project have the potential to save lives and reduce damage from tsunami disasters.

Learn more:

• On the Mach reflection of a solitary wave: revisited. W. Li, H. Yeh, and Y. Kodama. Journal of Fluid Mechanics 672:326-357. 2011.
• Laboratory study of the cross-shore flow structure in the surf and swash zones. M. Sou and H. Yeh. Journal of Geophysical Research 116, C03002. 2011
• Tsunami propagation, directivity, and pulse persistence from a finite source (Water Waves - Theory and Experiment (editors: M.F. Mahmood, D. Henderson, and H. Segur), World Scientific Publishing, Singapore, 120-139.)
• Wave Action! Terra magazine, January 2011
• Oregon group planning nation's first tsunami evacuation structure (OSU News & Research Communications, 2009)