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. 2020 Apr 29;10(1):7218.
doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-64100-6.

Millennial scale maximum intensities of typhoon and storm wave in the northwestern Pacific Ocean inferred from storm deposited reef boulders

Kenta Minamidate  1 , Kazuhisa Goto  2   3 , Masashi Watanabe  4   5 , Volker Roeber  6 , Ken Toguchi  7 , Masami Sannoh  8 , Yosuke Nakashima  9 , Hironobu Kan  10
Affiliations

Millennial scale maximum intensities of typhoon and storm wave in the northwestern Pacific Ocean inferred from storm deposited reef boulders

Kenta Minamidate et al. Sci Rep. .

Abstract

Typhoons and associated storm waves in the northwestern Pacific Ocean commonly cause coastal disasters. The possibility remains that an even stronger typhoon than the strongest one observed to date might have occurred before. The development of a method to estimate a maximum intensity of past typhoons over thousands of years is important for paleoclimatology, paleoceanography and disaster prevention. Numerous storm wave boulders exist on reefs in the Ryukyu Islands, Japan, which have been deposited to their present position by the cumulative effects of the past storm waves. These boulders can be used as proxies for the hydrodynamic conditions of the largest waves from past events. Here, we present numerical computations for storm waves and boulder transport with the boulder distribution as a constraint factor to estimate the maximum intensities of storm waves and their causative typhoon events over the past 3500 years. Though the intensities of the maximum estimated waves and associated typhoon events were slightly stronger than those recorded over the past ~70 years in the Ryukyu Islands, our results suggest that no abnormally intense typhoon has struck the Ryukyu Islands in the past 3500 years. The potential impact from tsunamis remains uncertain; however, our results are meteorologically reasonable.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
(a) A map of Ryukyu Islands. Kudaka Island is shown as a black solid circle. A base map is provided by ESRI Japan. (b) A map showing the boulder distribution in Kudaka Island (after Goto et al.). Red dotted line depicts the reef edge. A base map is created using data provided by Okinawa Prefecture. (c) A photo of the boulders on the reef. The photo was taken from the reef crest toward the land.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Results of storm simulation for caseT01. (a) Maximum wind velocity (m/s), and (b) maximum significant wave height (m). See Fig. S5 for other cases.
Figure 3
Figure 3
The results of wave and boulder transport calculations by BOSZ, and storm simulation by Delft-3D/SWAN. Red circle: wave condition that can move all marker boulders. A red regression curve is drawn using red plots with the smallest peak wave period in each significant wave height ranging from 10 to 19 m. Cross: wave condition that cannot move one or more marker boulders. Blue diamond: results of storm wave calculated by Delft-3D/SWAN modeling.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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