SCEC Award Number 18113 View PDF
Proposal Category Individual Proposal (Data Gathering and Products)
Proposal Title Earthquake Simulators, Statistics and Software: Forecasting, Nowcasting, and Tsunami Early Warning
Investigator(s)
Name Organization
John Rundle University of California, Davis
Other Participants Graduate Student Researcher - 1
SCEC Priorities 5a, 5b, 5c SCEC Groups CISM, EFP, SDOT
Report Due Date 04/30/2020 Date Report Submitted 05/11/2020
Project Abstract
 Activity this year has been focused on developing the earthquake-tsunami simulation pipeline as described in the proposed work. Large earthquakes on underwater subduction zones are associated with both vertical and horizontal sea floor displacements. The resulting displaced water flows outward in the form of a tsunami. These tsunamis can inundate populated coastal areas with little warning, devastating unprepared regions. Efforts to track ocean waves with GPS-equipped buoys are promising but limited by low spatial resolution. However, these surface waves interact with the atmosphere to produce density fluctuations in the ionosphere’s electron content, which can be detected by the myriad GNSS signals being sent through the atmosphere. The goal of this project is to use physically-based simulations of earthquakes, tsunamis, and the ionosphere to produce catalogs of synthetic ionosphere signatures corresponding to potential tsunamis in tsunamigenic regions around the world. These signatures could be compared to real-time GNSS signal data to provide early warning to those at risk of tsunami inundation.
Intellectual Merit Tsunami Squares has been rewritten using the open source boost geometry library and GeographicLib for accurate, fast calculation of geometric overlaps, distances, and areas in a spherical coordinate system. The pieces of the code that require the largest fraction of computation time (distributing water in the grid during movement and smoothing) have been parallelized using OpenMP.
Broader Impacts This code will allow substantially improved computation of tsunamis across basin-scale distances, conserving mass, momentum and energy, and will allow run-ups on shore to be computed easily.
Exemplary Figure Figure 1