Speaker: Dr Nobuhito Mori, Disaster Prevention Research Institute at Kyoto University

Topic 1 Ocean extreme waves

Freak waves, extreme waves in the ocean, are featured by a single and steep crest causing severe damage to offshore structures and ships. The last decade freak waves have become an important topic in engineering and science. Due to the many research efforts, the occurrence of freak waves, their mechanism and detailed dynamic properties are now becoming clear. We have been spent twenty years to develop the freak waves prediction based on nonlinear wave-wave interaction process. This seminar presents a summary of freak wave prediction method.

Topic 2 Mega tsunami waves

At 14:46 local time on March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake occurred off the coast of northeast Japan. This earthquake generated a tsunami that struck Japan as well as various locations around the Pacific Ocean. With the participation of researchers from throughout Japan, a joint research group conducted a tsunami survey along a 2000 km stretch of the Japanese coast. More than 5300 locations have been surveyed to date, generating the largest tsunami survey data set in the world. I will introduce our recent research activities on tsunami servery results, tsunami modeling and related topics in Japan.