Modelling with Volna-OP2—Towards Tsunami Threat Reduction for the Irish Coastline

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Abstract

Tsunamis are infrequent events that have the potential to be extremely destructive. The last major tsunami to effect the Irish coastline was the Lisbon 1755 event. That event acts as a candidate worst case scenario for hazard assessment and the impacts on the Irish Coastline are presented here. As there is no general consensus on the 1755 earthquake source, multiple sources highlighted in the literature are investigated. These sources are used to generate the initial conditions and the resultant tsunami waves are simulated with the massively parallelised Volna-OP2 finite volume tsunami code. The hazard associated with the event is captured on three gradated levels. A reduced faster than real time tsunami ensemble is produced for the North-East Atlantic on a regional level in 93 s using two Nvidia V100 GPUs. By identifying the most vulnerable sections of the Irish coastline from this regional forecast, some locally refined simulations are further carried out in a faster than real time setting. As arrival times on the coastline can be on the O(mins), these faster than real time reduced ensembles are of great benefit for tsunami warning. Volna-OP2’s capabilities in this respect are clearly demonstrated here. Finally, high resolution inundation simulations, which build upon the ensemble results, are carried out. To date this study provides the best estimate of assessing the hazard associated with a Lisbon-type tsunami event for the Irish coastline. The results of the inundation mapping highlight that along the vulnerable sections of coastline, inundation is constrained to low-lying areas with maximum run-up heights of 3.4 m being found.

Recommended citation: Giles, D., McConnell, B., and Dias, F.: Modelling with Volna-OP2—Towards Tsunami Threat Reduction for the Irish Coastline, Geosciences, 10(6), 226, https://doi.org/10.3390/geosciences10060226, 2020.