Introduction to “Tsunami Science Four Years After the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, Part I: Modelling and Hazard Assessment”

In this introduction we briefly summarize the 14 contributions to Part I of this special issue on Tsunami Science Four Years after the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. These papers are representative of the new tsunami science being conducted since the occurrence of that tragic event. Most of these were presented at the session: Tsunami Generation and Hazard, of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics XXIV General Assembly held at Perugia, Italy, in July of 2007. That session included over one hundred presentations on a wide range of topics in tsunami research. The papers grouped into Part I, and introduced here, cover topics directly related to tsunami mitigation such as numerical modelling, hazard assessment and databases. Part II of this special issue, Observations and Data Analysis, will be published in a subsequent volume of Pure and Applied Geophysics.