Inundation modelling of the December 2004 Indian ocean tsunami

Abstract

Geoscience Australia, in an open collaboration with the Mathematical Sciences Institute, The Australian National University, is developing a software application, ANUGA, to model the hydrodynamics of floods, storm surges and tsunamis. The free source software implements a finite volume centralupwind Godunov method to solve the non-linear depth-averaged shallow water wave equations. In light of the renewed interest in tsunami forecasting and mitigation, this paper explores the use of ANUGA to model the inundation of the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004. The Method of Splitting Tsunamis (MOST) was used to simulate the initial tsunami source and the tsunami's propagation at depths greater than 100m. The resulting output was used to provide boundary conditions to the ANUGA model in the shallow water. Data with respect to 4-minute bathymetry, 2-minute bathymetry, 3-arc second bathymetry and elevation were used in the open ocean, shallow water and on land, respectively. A particular aim was to make use of the comparatively large amount of observed data corresponding to this event, including tide gauges and run-up heights, to provide a conditional assessment of the computational model's performance. Specifically we compared model tsunami depth with data collected at two tide gauges and 18 coastal run-up measurements.