Paper detail

Modelling with Volna-OP2: Towards tsunami threat reduction

Accurate and efficient tsunami modelling is essential for providing tsunami forecasts and hazard assessments. Volna-OP2 is a finite volume solver of the nonlinear shallow water equations and its capabilities of producing both faster than real time ensembles and high resolution inundation studies are presented here. The code is massively parallelised and can utilise various high performance computing architectures. When an earthquake is detected there is always some uncertainty on the source parameters. Generating a faster than real time ensemble for maximum wave heights which captures this uncertainty would be of great benefit to tsunami warning centres. The 2003 Boumerdes earthquake (Algeria) acts as a test case for showing Volna-OP2's ability at rapidly forecasting regional maximum wave heights. Drawing on various earthquake sources proposed in the literature and scaling the magnitudes to mimic uncertainty on the source, 20 separate earthquake realisations are simulated for 4 hours real time in 97s on two Nvidia V100 GPUs. Further a reduced ensemble of the Lisbon 1755 tsunami with an emphasis on the effects to the Irish coastline is presented. Where again various earthquake sources have been drawn from the literature and simulated on a regional scale. Finally, a pilot study which builds upon the reduced ensemble results investigates the inundation of a Lisbon tsunami on key sections of the Irish coastline. The results of this pilot study highlight that the inundation is constrained to low-lying areas with maximum run-up heights of $\approx 3.4m$ being found.