NOAA's Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC) has modeled historical tsunamis using the Real-Time Forecasting of Tsunamis (RIFT) forecast model (Wang et al., 2012), the same tool that it uses to determine tsunami hazards in real time for any tsunami today. The RIFT model takes earthquake information as input and calculates how the tsunami waves move through the world’s oceans, predicting their speed, wavelength, and amplitude.This map displays an "energy map" for selected historical tsunami events, made available by Nathan Becker (NOAA/PTWC). Each energy map is a mathematical surface representing the maximum rise in sea-level on the open ocean caused by the tsunami, a pattern that indicates that the kinetic energy of the tsunami was not distributed evenly across the oceans but instead forms a highly directional "beam" such that the tsunami was far more severe in the middle of the "beam" of energy than on its sides. This pattern also generally correlates to the coastal impacts, but does not necessarily match the tsunami wave heights measured at the coastline.The tsunami amplitudes are displayed using this color scale:Selected historical tsunami events are included as separate layers:1700/01/27 Cascadia Subduction Zone1755/11/01 Lisbon, Portugal1946/04/01 Unimak Island, Alaska1957/03/09 Andreanof Islands, Alaska1960/05/22 Southern Chile1964/03/28 Prince William Sound, Alaska2004/12/16 Sumatra, Indonesia2009/09/29 Samoa2010/02/27 Central Chile2011/03/11 Tohoku, JapanWeb links:Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC)RIFT Tsunami Forecast Animations from PTWC