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Global dissipation models for simulating tsunamis at far-field coasts up to 60 hours post-earthquake: Multi-site tests in Australia

At far-field coasts the largest tsunami waves often occur many hours after arrival, and hazardous waves may persist for more than a day. To simulate tsunamis at far-field coasts it is common to combine high-resolution nonlinear shallow water models (covering sites of interest) with low-resolution reduced-physics global-scale models (to efficiently simulate propagation). The global propagation models often ignore friction and are mathematically energy conservative, so in theory the modelled tsunami will persist indefinitely. In contrast, real tsunamis exhibit slow dissipation at the global-scale with an energy e-folding time of approximately one day. How strongly do these global-scale approximations affect nearshore tsunamis simulated at far-field coasts? To investigate this issue we compare modelled and observed tsunamis at sixteen nearshore tide-gauges in Australia, which were generated by the following earthquakes: Mw 9.5 Chile 1960; Mw 9.2 Sumatra 2004; Mw 8.8 Chile 2010; Mw 9.1 Tohoku 2011; and Mw 8.3 Chile 2015. Each historic tsunami is represented with multiple earthquake source models from the literature, to prevent bias in any single source from dominating the results. The tsunami is simulated for 60 hours with a nested global-to-local model. On the nearshore grids we solve the nonlinear shallow water equations with Manning-friction, while on the global grid we test three reduced-physics propagation models which combine the linear shallow water equations with alternative treatments of friction: 1) frictionless; 2) nonlinear Manning-friction; and 3) constant linear-friction. In comparison with data, the frictionless global model works well for simulating nearshore tsunami maxima for ~ 8 hours after tsunami arrival, and Manning-friction gives similar predictions in this period. Constant linear-friction is found to under-predict the size of early arriving waves. As the simulation duration is increased from 36 to 60 hours, the frictionless global model increasingly over-estimates the observed tsunami maxima; whereas both models with global-scale friction perform relatively well. The constant linear-friction model can be improved using delayed linear-friction, where propagation is simulated with an initial frictionless period (12 hours herein). This prevents the systematic underestimation of early nearshore wave heights. While nonlinear Manning-friction offers comparably good performance, a practical advantage of the linear-friction models in this study is that their solutions can be computed, to high accuracy, with a simple transformation of frictionless solutions. This offers a pragmatic approach to improving unit-source based global tsunami simulations at late times.

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Identification info

Date (Creation)
2020
Date (Publication)
2020-11-03T04:38:56
Citation identifier
Geoscience Australia Persistent Identifier/https://pid.geoscience.gov.au/dataset/ga/144176

Identifier

Codespace

Digital Object Identifier

Cited responsible party
Role Organisation / Individual Name Details
Author

Davies, G.

Author

Romano, F.

Author

Lorito, S.

Status
Completed
Point of contact
Role Organisation / Individual Name Details
Point of contact

Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia)

Voice
Point of contact

Davies, G.

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Place, Space and Communities Division

Spatial representation type
Topic category
  • Geoscientific information
  • Oceans

Extent

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N
S
E
W


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As needed

Resource format

Title

Product data repository: Various Formats

Protocol

FILE:DATA-DIRECTORY

Name of the resource

Data Store directory containing the digital product files

Description

Data Store directory containing one or more files, possibly in a variety of formats, accessible to Geoscience Australia staff only for internal purposes

theme.ANZRC Fields of Research.rdf
  • OCEANOGRAPHY

  • EARTH SCIENCES

GCMD Keywords
  • Earth Science Services | Models

  • Earth Science | Human Dimensions | Natural Hazards | Tsunamis

Keywords
  • Published_External

Resource constraints

Title

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence

Alternate title

CC-BY

Edition

4.0

Website

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/

Access constraints
License
Use constraints
License

Resource constraints

Title

Australian Government Security ClassificationSystem

Edition date
2018-11-01T00:00:00
Website

https://www.protectivesecurity.gov.au/Pages/default.aspx

Classification
Unclassified

Associated resource

Association Type
null
Title

Links to code and data required to reproduce the results of the paper

Identifier

Description

Links to code and data required to reproduce the results of the paper

Website

https://github.com/GeoscienceAustralia/ptha/tree/master/misc/nearshore_testing_2020

Links to code and data required to reproduce the results of the paper

Language
English
Character encoding
UTF8

Distribution Information

Distributor contact
Role Organisation / Individual Name Details
Distributor

Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia)

Voice
OnLine resource

Link to article

Link to article

Distribution format
  • html

Resource lineage

Statement

Drafted by GD with input from co-authors

Metadata constraints

Title

Australian Government Security Classification System

Edition date
2018-11-01T00:00:00
Website

https://www.protectivesecurity.gov.au/Pages/default.aspx

Classification
Unclassified

Metadata

Metadata identifier
urn:uuid/038bade6-f5ff-4507-a2b8-d61990ddd8f2

Title

GeoNetwork UUID

Language
English
Character encoding
UTF8
Contact
Role Organisation / Individual Name Details
Point of contact

Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia)

Voice
Point of contact

Davies, G.

Type of resource

Resource scope
Document
Name

GA publication: Global dissipation models for simulating tsunamis at far-field coasts up to 60 hours post-earthquake: Multi-site tests in Australia

Type of resource

Resource scope
Dataset

Alternative metadata reference

Title

Geoscience Australia - short identifier for metadata record with

uuid

Citation identifier
eCatId/144176

Metadata linkage

https://ecat.ga.gov.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/catalog.search#/metadata/5167d912-6784-4371-9938-3931e84ca6f1

Metadata linkage

https://ecat.ga.gov.au:80/geonetwork/srv/eng/catalog.search#/metadata/038bade6-f5ff-4507-a2b8-d61990ddd8f2

Metadata linkage

https://ecat.ga.gov.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/catalog.search#/metadata/038bade6-f5ff-4507-a2b8-d61990ddd8f2

Date info (Creation)
2019-04-08T01:55:29
Date info (Revision)
2019-04-08T01:55:29

Metadata standard

Title

AU/NZS ISO 19115-1:2014

Metadata standard

Title

ISO 19115-1:2014

Metadata standard

Title

ISO 19115-3

Title

Geoscience Australia Community Metadata Profile of ISO 19115-1:2014

Edition

Version 2.0, September 2018

Citation identifier
https://pid.geoscience.gov.au/dataset/ga/122551

 
 

Spatial extent

N
S
E
W


Keywords

GCMD Keywords
Earth Science Services | Models Earth Science | Human Dimensions | Natural Hazards | Tsunamis
theme.ANZRC Fields of Research.rdf
EARTH SCIENCES OCEANOGRAPHY

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