Towards Adaptive Simulations of Dispersive Tsunami Propagation from an Asteroid Impact

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel adaptive simulation framework for dispersive tsunami modeling, crucial for accurately capturing short wavelength phenomena like asteroid impacts, by employing a fractional step scheme with multi-resolution patches.

Contribution

It introduces a fractional step scheme enabling adaptive, multi-resolution simulations of dispersive tsunamis, addressing challenges in implicit systems and scale bridging.

Findings

Successful simulation with 7 levels of adaptive meshes

Accurate modeling of onshore inundation from asteroid impact

Discussion of open research questions for high-quality simulations

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.