Tetsushi Kurita

Tsunami public awareness and the disaster management system of Sri Lanka

Purpose – This study aims to assess and evaluate the disaster management system in Sri Lanka and the capacity of a local community to respond to natural disasters, and to propose a strategy for the dissemination of tsunami knowledge while raising public awareness of tsunami disasters.Design/methodology/approach – The survey focused on three clusters of respondents and different methodologies were adopted to collect data from each group, as follows: residents: questionnaires followed by a structured interview; school children: questionnaires completed under the guidance of a teacher; government officials: questionnaires completed independently by respondents, and followed up with unstructured interviews with officials in charge of disaster related activities.Findings – The results of the survey of residents indicate that; more than 90 percent of residents lacked tsunami knowledge prior to the 2004 tsunami; the main source of information during the disaster was direct information from family and neighbors; ...

Sensitivity analysis on measurement noise in the identification of soil properties from vertical array observation data

This study clarified the effects of measurement noise on identification of soil properties from vertical array observation of seismic waves. In order to evaluate the sensitivity of the unknown parameter with respect to error caused by noise, the amplitude of a transfer function was used to formulate the evaluation function in the frequency domain. Also the logarithmic amplitude was used to formulate the evaluation function and compare the sensitivity between the two types of amplitude expressions. A numerical experiment, based on a simple-structured ground model, showed that these evaluation functions produced satisfactory results which were in good agreement with identified results obtained by the measurement data contaminated by artificially generated errors. The present theory, when applied to actual earthquake records, proved useful in evaluating the influence of the non-linearity of soil characteristics.