Tsunami Squares: fast tsunami computation for use in coupled earthquake, tsunami, and ionosphere simulations

John M. Wilson, John B. Rundle, Steven Ward, Andrea Donnellan, Tony Song, Attila Komjathy, & Giorgio Savastano

Published August 11, 2017, SCEC Contribution #7493, 2017 SCEC Annual Meeting Poster #277

Tsunamis are one of the costliest natural disasters in terms of both economic impact and loss of life. Estimates of coastal inundation after a tsunamigenic earthquake inform evacuation decisions, but data about coseismic displacement and tsunami wave properties can be sparse in the minutes following the earthquake. One promising channel of information about large ruptures and ensuing tsunamis is the Total Electron Content of the ionosphere, as detected by GNSS satellites. TEC signatures corresponding to known tsunami scenarios can inform the decisions of early warning officials. In order to create such a catalog of precomputed earthquake, tsunami, and ionospheric signature scenarios, we are developing a pipeline of physics-based simulations. Tsunami Squares is a computationally-lightweight method for translating seafloor displacements into water waves and coastal inundations, suited to the task of efficiently generating large catalogs of scenarios. We present the current state of this implementation of the Tsunami Squares method.

Key Words
tsunami early warning, computational methods, GNSS, ionosphere

Citation
Wilson, J. M., Rundle, J. B., Ward, S., Donnellan, A., Song, T., Komjathy, A., & Savastano, G. (2017, 08). Tsunami Squares: fast tsunami computation for use in coupled earthquake, tsunami, and ionosphere simulations. Poster Presentation at 2017 SCEC Annual Meeting.

Related Projects & Working Groups
Computational Science (CS)