New insights on the tsunami recording of the May, 21, 2003, Mw 6.9Boumerdès earthquake from tidal data analysis

Abstract

We analyzed sea level data from a set of tide gauge stations located in the central and western Mediter-ranean Sea, that recorded the tsunami generated by the Mw 6.8 Boumerdès earthquake striking the coastof Algeria on May 21, 2003. This earthquake caused more than 2200 victims and thousands of injured. Thecausative fault was located a few kilometers offshore and during the rupture a tsunami was triggered.Waves were felt along a large part of the western and northern Mediterranean coasts, and in the Balearicislands waves higher that 2 m were measured. In this paper we analyze a more complete tidal data set,with respect to previous studies, now consisting of 22 tidal stations located in Italy, France and Spain. Tocharacterize the change of the tidal signal at each station we used the Empirical Mode Decomposition(EMD). By means of this technique, which is suitable to analyze and to characterize the dynamical behav-ior of non-stationary time series, we provide a precise measurement of the arrival times and amplitudesat the tidal stations and identify how this tsunami affected the principal and long term tidal components.Our findings improve previous results for this earthquake, since they allow the detection of significantamplitude fluctuations associated with the tsunami in the majority of stations, including the farthestones.