tsunami intensity
Size of a tsunami based on the macroscopic observation of a tsunami’s effect on humans, objects including various sizes of marine vessels, and buildings.
The original scale for tsunamis was published by Sieberg (1923), and later modified by Ambraseys (1962) to create a six-category scale. Papadopoulus and Imamura (2001) proposed a new 12-grade intensity scale which is independent of the need to measure physical parameters like wave amplitude, sensitive to the small differences in tsunami effects, and detailed enough for each grade to cover the many possible types of tsunami impact on the human and natural environment. The scale has 12 categories, similar to the Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale used for macroseismic descriptions of earthquake intensity.