APPLICATION OF HF COASTAL OCEAN RADAR TO TSUNAMI OBSERVATIONS

When tsunami waves propagate across open ocean they are steered by Coriolis force and refraction due to gentle gradients in the bathymetry on scales longer than the wavelength. When the wave encounters steep gradients at the edges of continental shelves and at the coast, the wave becomes non-linear and conservation of momentum produces squirts of surface current at the head of submerged canyons and in coastal bays. HF coastal ocean radar is well-conditioned to observe the current bursts at the edge of the continental shelf and give a warning of 40 minutes to 2 hours when the shelf is 50-200km wide. The period of tsunami waves is invariant over changes in bathymetry and is in the range 2-30 minutes. Wavelengths for tsunamis (in 500-3000 m depth) are in the range 8.5 to over 200 km and on a shelf where the depth is about 50 m (as in the Great Barrier Reef) the wavelengths are in the range 2.5 - 30 km. It is shown that the phased array HF ocean surface radar being deployed in the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) and operating in a routine way for mapping surface currents, can resolve surface current squirts from tsunamis in the wave period range 20-30 minutes and in the wavelength range greater than about 6 km. There is a trade-off between resolution of surface current speed and time resolution. If the radar is actively managed with automatic intervention during a tsunami alert period (triggered from the global seismic network) then it is estimated that the time resolution of the GBR radar may be reduced to about 2 minutes, which corresponds to a capability to detect tsunamis at the shelf edge in the period range 5-30 minutes. It is estimated that the lower limit of squirt velocity detection at the shelf edge would correspond to a tsunami with water elevation of less than 5 cm in the open ocean. This means that the GBR HF radar is well-conditioned for use as a monitor of small and medium scale tsunamis, and has the potential to contribute to the understanding of tsunami genesis research.