NEES Multidirectional Wave Basin for Tsunami Research

Oregon State is upgrading its multidirectional wave basin under the National Science Foundation Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) program to create a next-generation experimental testing facility for research and practicing engineers. The new facility addresses the unique requirements posed by tsunami researchers, with basin dimensions and wave generation capabilities closely matching the community's vision of the "ideal basin". When completed in 2004, the basin will support high resolution, unprecedented-scale experiments with very dense instrumentation. Researchers will be able to test and validate advanced analytical and numerical models of general environmental fluid mechanics issues in coastal science and engineering including tsunami phenomena induced by sub-sea earthquakes, spanning a full range of ocean, coastal, and harbor studies. An integral part of the upgraded facility is the exploitation of advanced network technologies to allow researchers located at distant sites to play active roles in experiments at the facility, viewing data and images in real time and participating in decision-making. The broader research community will benefit from this large long-wave experiment facility, a comprehensive experiment databank, with specialized interfaces for experiment re-play, searching and browsing archives of past experiments, extraction of experimental data for use in validating numerical models, and a community repository for numerical simulation codes. A summary of the progress on basin building, wave generator and network system design, construction, installation and planned research will be presented.