FAST EVALUATION OF TSUNAMI WAVES HEIGHTS AROUND KAMCHATKA AND KURIL ISLANDS

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the problem of fast wave heights numerical evaluation of hypothetical tsunami along Pacific coast of Kamchatka Peninsula and the Kuril Islands. We focus on PC-based fast numerical calculation of tsunami wave propagation according to the classical shallow water approximation. Valuable performance gain is achieved by using the advantages of the modern computer architectures, namely the Field Programmable Gates Arrays (FPGAs). The Mac-Cormack finite difference scheme of the second order approximation to solve the shallow water system (Titov V. and Gonzalez F. 1997) has been implemented to the FPGA-based Calculator, specially designed by the authors for this task (Lavrentiev et al., 2017; Lysakov et al., 2018). Numerical tests show that it takes only a few seconds to calculate tsunami wave propagation over approximately 2000x2000 km (3120x2400 knots) water area with about 900 m step gridded bathymetry for the given realistic tsunami wave source. The FPGA calculator was also tested on the exact analytical solution obtained by Marchuk (2017) for model bottom topography.

Keywords

• tsunami wave heights
• Kamchatka tsunami
• Kuril Islands