Towards adaptive simulations of dispersive tsunami propagation from an asteroid impact
Marsha J. Berger
Courant Institute, New York University, 251 Mercer St., New York, NY 10012, USA, and Flatiron Institute, 162 5th Ave., New York, NY 10010, USARandall J. LeVeque
Department of Applied Math, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA, and HyperNumerics LLC, Seattle, WA, USA
This book chapter is published open access.
Abstract
The long-term goal of this work is the development of high-fidelity simulation tools for dispersive tsunami propagation. A dispersive model is especially important for short wavelength phenomena such as an asteroid impact into the ocean, and is also important in modeling other events where the simpler shallow water equations are insufficient. Adaptive simulations are crucial to bridge the scales from deep ocean to inundation, but have difficulties with the implicit system of equations that results from dispersive models. We propose a fractional step scheme that advances the solution on separate patches with different spatial resolutions and time steps. We show a simulation with 7 levels of adaptive meshes and onshore inundation resulting from a simulated asteroid impact off the coast of Washington. Finally, we discuss a number of open research questions that need to be resolved for high quality simulations.