Since the 2004 Sumatra-Andaman Earthquake, understanding the potential for tsunami impact on coastlines has become a high priority for Australia and other countries in the Asia-Pacific region. Tsunami warning systems have a need to rapidly assess the potential impact of specific events, and hazard assessments require an understanding of all potential events that might be of concern. Both of these needs can be addressed through numerical modelling, but there are often significant uncertainties associated with the three physical properties that culminate in tsunami impact: excitation, propagation and runup. This talk will focus on the first of these, and attempt to establish that seismic models of the tsunami source are adequate for rapidly and accurately establishing initial conditions for forecasting tsunami impacts at regional and teletsunami distances. Specifically, we derive fault slip models via inversion of teleseismic waveform data, and use these slip models to compute seafloor deformation that is used as the initial condition for tsunami propagation. The resulting tsunami waveforms are compared with observed waveforms recorded by ocean bottom pressure recorders (BPRs). We show that, at least for the large megathrust earthquakes that are the most frequent source of damaging tsunami, the open-ocean tsunami recorded by the BPRs are well predicted by the seismic source models. For smaller earthquakes, or those which occur on steeply dipping faults, however, the excitation and propagation of the resulting tsunami can be significantly influenced by 3D hydrodynamics and by dispersion, respectively. This makes it mode difficult to predict the tsunami waveforms.

The tragic events of the Indian Ocean tsunami on 26 December 2004 highlighted shortcomings in the alert and response systems for tsunami threats to Western Australia's (WA) coastal communities. To improve community awareness and understanding of tsunami hazard and potential impact for Western Australia, the Fire and Emergency Services Authority of WA (FESA) established a collaborative partnership with GA in which science and emergency management expertise was applied to identified communities.

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The aim of the present work is to determine to what extent event-specific tsunami amplitude forecasts from different numerical forecast systems differ, and therefore, how the related products from RTSPs might differ. This is done through comparing tsunami amplitudes for a number of different hypothetical tsunami events within the Indian Ocean, from a number of different tsunami scenario databases.

In response to the devastating Indian Ocean Tsunami (IOT) that occurred on the 26th of December 2004, Geoscience Australia developed a framework for tsunami risk modelling. The outputs from this methodology have been used by emergency managers throughout Australia. For GA to be confident in the information that is being provided to the various stakeholders' validation of the model and methodology is required. While the huge loss of life from the tsunami was tragic, the IOT did provide a unique opportunity to record the impact of a tsunami on the coast of Western Australia. Eight months after the tsunami a post-disaster survey was conducted at various locations along the coast and maximum run-up was determined from direct observational evidence or anecdotal accounts. In addition tide gauges located in harbours along the coast also recorded the tsunami and provide a timeseries account of the wave heights and frequency of the event. This study employs the tsunami hazard modelling methodology used by Geoscience Australia (GA) to simulate a tsunami scenario based on the source parameters obtained from the Boxing Day earthquake of 2004. The model results are compared to observational evidence from satellite altimetry, inundation surveys and tide gauge data for Geraldton, a community on the Western Australian coast. Results show that the tsunami model provides good estimates of the wave height in deep water and also run up in inundated areas and it importantly matches the timing of the first wave arrivals. However the model fails to reproduce the timeseries data of wave heights observed by a tide gauge in Geraldton harbour. The model does however replicate the occurrence of a late arriving (16 hrs after first arrival) wave packet of high frequency waves. This observation is encouraging since this particular wave packet has been noted elsewhere in the Indian Ocean and caused havoc in harbours many hours after the initial waves had arrived and dissipated.

Because the vast majority of continental Australia is over 1000 km from the nearest plate boundary, it might be thought that the state of its lithosphere is relatively uninfluenced by seismic coupling along the plate margins. However, research on crustal stress over the last decade, and more recent work in refinement of geodetic measurements of strain rate, has shown that both the stress and strain rate in Australia are strongly influenced by active tectonics along the boundaries of the Australian plate. The ability of plate boundary processes to influence stress and strain rate in the plate interior is intimately connected with seismic coupling. Seismic coupling is defined as the extent to which relative plate motion is accommodated by earthquake slip, and has traditionally been calculated by comparing earthquake catalogs with plate motion estimates. Recent earthquake and tsunami activity along the margins of the Australian plate, as well as worldwide, have highlighted shortcomings in our estimation of seismic coupling, and even called into question its usefulness as a concept. The occurrence of great earthquakes such as the 2004 Sumatra-Andaman event demonstrates that catalog completeness is often insufficient to adequately characterize earthquake activity in the subduction zones of Oceania. Slow slip observed in New Zealand, and triggered rupture of the putatively aseismic Tonga subduction zone show that, even if earthquake catalogs were complete, they may not adequately describe the frictional state of subduction megathrusts. This presentation will review how recent observations of earthquake and tsunami activity along the margins of the Australian plate have revealed an astounding variety in frictional behaviour of the subduction zone megathrust, and discuss what implications this has for its ability to transmit stress to the plate interior.

The effect of offshore coral reefs on the impact from a tsunami remains controversial. For example, field surveys after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami indicate that the energy of the tsunami was reduced by natural coral reef barriers in Sri Lanka, but there was no indication that coral reefs off Banda Aceh, Indonesia had any effect on the tsunami. In this paper, we investigate whether the Great Barrier Reef offshore Queensland, Australia, may have weakened the tsunami impact from the 2007 Solomon Islands earthquake. The fault slip distribution of the 2007 Solomon Islands earthquake was firstly obtained by teleseismic inversion. The tsunami was then propagated to shallow water just offshore the coast by solving the linear shallow water equations using a staggered grid finite difference method. We used a relatively high resolution (approximately 250m) bathymetric grid for the region just off the coast containing the reef. The tsunami waveforms recorded at tide gauge stations along the Australian coast were then compared to the results from the tsunami simulation when using both the realistic 250m resolution bathymetry and with two grids with an imaginary bathymetry. One of the grids with an imaginary bathymetry removes the coral reef and interpolates an artificial bathymetry across it. The other imaginary grid replaces the reef with a flat plane at a depth equal to the mean water depth of the Great Barrier Reef. From the comparison between the synthetic waveforms both with and without the Great Barrier Reef, we found that the Great Barrier Reef significantly weakened the tsunami impact. According to our model, the coral reefs delayed the tsunami arrival time by 5-10 minutes, decreased the amplitude of the first tsunami pulse to half or less, and made the period of the tsunami longer.

The tragic events of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami highlighted the real threat posed by tsunamis to coastal communities worldwide. With subduction zones to the north and east of Australia, tsunamis pose a real threat to the Australian coast. Geoscience Australia has been developing methodologies for quantifying the severity of tsunami impacts to assist emergency management authorities in planning for this threat. Tsunami inundation modelling is computationally intensive and is often restricted to a small number of discrete communities. As a result, communities must be prioritised for this detailed modelling. One method for prioritisation is the Probabilistic Tsunami Hazard Assessment (PTHA) of Australia. In the PTHA, tsunamis were modelled from all likely earthquake sources across the deep ocean using a computationally faster linear solution and coarser model domain. Results are considered valid only to the 100 m depth contour, where we calculate return periods for tsunami wave height around Australia and generate a database of tsunami wave forms. However, tsunami waves are shaped considerably by the bathymetry between the 100 m depth contour and the coast, and tsunami behaviour near the coast is therefore highly non-linear, dependent on elevation, coastline shape, wave height, period and momentum. This non-linear reality of the near shore environment raises a number of questions. Is offshore wave height alone the best predictor of onshore tsunami hazard? Analytical solutions to the 1-D shallow water equations exist for predicting wave run-up on plane beaches. Can these be applied to offshore waves to measure inundation potential? Or are other metrics, such as wave energy, more appropriate? Comparisons with results from detailed inundation models will explore the utility of these measures for prioritising communitie

Since the 2004 Sumatra-Andaman earthquake and Indian Ocean Tsunami, there has been an increase both in the frequency of large earthquakes, and in the data for monitoring the seismic and sea level disturbances associated with them, especially in the Australasian region. The increased number of high-quality recordings available for these large earthquakes provides an important opportunity to assess methods for rapid determination of their source properties, which potentially could be used to support tsunami warning systems. In this presentation we will consider how well the available data allow us to characterise the rupture of a earthquake, consider how rapidly this could be done, and assess how well the resulting models can be used to predict far-field tsunami waveforms.

The occurrence of the Indian Ocean Tsunami on 26 December, 2004 has raised concern about the difficulty in determining appropriate tsunami mitigation measures in Australia, due to the lack of information on the tsunami threat. A first step in the development of such measures is a tsunami hazard assessment, which gives an indication of which areas of coastline are most likely to experience tsunami, and how likely such events are. Here we present the results of a probabilistic tsunami hazard assessment for Western Australia (WA). Compared to other parts of Australia, the WA coastline experiences a relatively high frequency of tsunami occurrence. This hazard is due to earthquakes along the Sunda Arc, south of Indonesia. Our work shows that large earthquakes offshore of Java and Sumba are likely to be a greater threat to WA than those offshore of Sumatra or elsewhere in Indonesia. A magnitude 9 earthquake offshore of the Indonesian islands of Java or Sumba has the potential to significantly impact a large part of the West Australian coastline. The level of hazard varies along the coast, but is highest along the coast from Carnarvon to Dampier. Tsunami generated by other sources (e.g. large intra-plate events, volcanoes, landslides and asteroids) were not considered in this study, which limits our hazard assessment to recurrence times of 2000 years or less.