Hindawi Publishing Corporation Mathematical Problems in Engineering Volume 2012, Article ID 472575, 16 pages doi:10.1155/2012/472575 Research Article A Determination of an Abrupt Motion of the Sea Bottom by Using Snapshot Data of Water Waves T. S. Jang, 1 Hong Gun Sung, 2 and Jinsoo Park 1 1 Department of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering, Pusan National University, Busan 609-735, Republic of Korea 2 Maritime and Ocean Engineering Research Institute, Daejeon 305-343, Republic of Korea Correspondence should be addressed to T. S. Jang, taek@pusan.ac.kr Received 20 June 2011; Revised 17 September 2011; Accepted 8 October 2011 Academic Editor: Mohammad Younis Copyright q 2012 T. S. Jang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This paper presents an inverse problem and its solution procedure, which are aimed at identifying a sudden underwater movement of the sea bottom. The identification is mathematically shown to work with a known snapshot data of generated water wave configurations. It is also proved that the problem has a unique solution. However, the inverse problem is involved in an integral equation of the first kind, resulting in an ill-posed problem in the sense of stability. That is, the problem lacks solution stability properties. To overcome the difficulty of solution instability, in this paper, a stabilization technique, called regularization, is incorporated in the present solution procedure for the identification of the sea bottom movement. A numerical experiment is presented to demonstrate that the proposed numerical solution procedure operates. 1. Introduction In the field of natural science and ocean engineering, it is not only of interest but important to examine how waves are generated in the ocean surface by the underwater abrupt movement of the sea bottom. If we knew the information of the underwater abrupt movement in advance, it would enable us to determine how the waves propagate in space and time. In practice, this can be extremely crucial, for example, for a Tsunami Warning System TWS, which is used to detect tsunamis and issue warnings to prevent loss of life and property. The problem of finding the resulting wave flow field has been usually solved based on the potential wave model. For example, excellent research has been made on the subject of wave generation and propagation 1–4. Even if much progress has been achieved in determining the resulting wave flow or forward problem, only few attempts have been