Tsunami hazard scenarios in the Adriatic Sea domain

Abstract

The tsunami phenomenon is mainly detected in oceanic domains but it can also occur in small basins as the Adriatic Sea. The presence of great waves has been recorded a few times in the past centuries on the Adriatic shorelines, therefore this suggests the idea to evaluate which could be the maximum amplitude reached by a possible future tsunami event. In this framework we calculate several synthetic mareograms applying to the shallow water basin case both the theory of modal summation by Panza et al. (2000) and the theory of the Green's function by Yanovskaya et al. (2003). The first is applied to the case of tsunamis generated by an offshore source, the second to the case of tsunamis generated by an inland source. Both kinds of tsunamigenic events did already occur in the Adriatic domain, as witnessed in many catalogues (Caputo and Faita, 1984; Bedosti and Caputo, 1986; Tinti et al., 2004) and also pointed out in the recent "Catalogue of reported tsunami events in the Adriatic Sea" (see Appendix). We calculate synthetic mareograms varying those parameters which are the most influencing in tsunami generation, such as magnitude, focal depth, water layer thickness, etc., in order to estimate the expected values of tsunami maximum amplitude and arrival time, in the whole Adriatic basin, for the selected scenarios.