Sedimentation Modeling of 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami: Towards Early Warning Strategy

Natural hazard is a series of calamitous events that leads to quashing of lives in millions and mass destruction of properties in billions. These events are earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, landslides etc., which just takes only few minutes or hours to create such devastation that can affect countries at all fronts. It leads to socioeconomic breakdown and environmental degradation in that region. Thus, these catastrophic events require extensive research to figure out its nature, how it gets generated, its affect spatially-temporally and mitigation factors, which need to be considered. In the last few decades, Indian sub- continent experienced several catastrophic earthquakes. Sumatra Andaman earthquake (Mw 9.3) occurred on December 26th, 2004 resulted into the transoceanic tsunami event. This tsunami event directly affected the coastlines of Indian Mainland, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia, Maldives and, killing about 280,000 people. Transportation of sediments during tsunami flow cause either erosion or depositions of sediments. In this study, the tsunami sedimentation modeling technique was applied to 2004 tsunamigenic earthquake to estimate the tsunami flow height, flow speed and energy of tsunami waves. This study will help in formulation and design of mitigation measures with the early warning systems, which may eventually lead to less loss of life and damages to the property in seismically active coastal areas.