Natalja Rakowsky

An evaluation of onshore digital elevation models for modeling tsunami inundation zones

A sensitivity study is undertaken to assess the utility of different onshore digital elevation models (DEM) for simulating the extent of tsunami inundation using case studies from two locations in Indonesia. We compare airborne IFSAR, ASTER and SRTM against high resolution LiDAR and stereo-camera data in locations with different coastal morphologies. Tsunami inundation extents modelled with airborne IFSAR DEMs are comparable with those modelled with the higher resolution datasets and are also consistent with historical run-up data, where available. Large vertical errors and poor resolution of the coastline in the ASTER and SRTM elevation datasets cause the modelled inundation extent to be much less compared with the other datasets and observations. Therefore ASTER and SRTM should not be used to underpin tsunami inundation models. a model mesh resolution of 25 m was sufficient for estimating the inundated area when using elevation data with high vertical accuracy in the case studies presented here. Differences in modelled inundation between digital terrain models (DTM) and digital surface models (DSM) for LiDAR and IFSAR are greater than differences between the two data types. Models using DTM may overestimate inundation while those using DSM may underestimate inundation when a constant Manning’s roughness value is used. We recommend using DTM for modelling tsunami inundation extent with further work needed to resolve the scale at which surface roughness should be parameterised.

Extending and Visualizing the TsunAWI Simulation Database of the Indonesia Tsunami Early Warning System (InaTEWS)

After the devastating Indian Ocean Tsunami 2004, the BMBF-project “German-Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System” GITEWS was part of the German contribution to reconstruction and development in the affected regions in Indonesia. As there had been no system for early tsunami warnings in the entire Indian Ocean, the project partners—with the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) as leading institute—designed and built this state-of-the-art warning system step by step.

FESOM-C: coastal dynamics on hybrid unstructured meshes

We describe FESOM-C, the coastal branch of the Finite-volumE Sea ice – Ocean Model (FESOM2), which shares with FESOM2 many numerical aspects, in particular, its finite-volume cell-vertex discretization. Its dynamical core differs by the implementation of time stepping, the use of terrain-following vertical coordinate and formulation for hybrid meshes composed of triangles and quads. The first two distinctions were critical for coding FESOM-C as an independent branch. The hybrid mesh capability improves numerical efficiency, since quadrilateral cells have fewer edges than triangular cells. They do 5 not suffer from spurious inertial modes of the triangular cell-vertex discretization and need less dissipation. The hybrid mesh capability allows one to use quasi-quadrilateral unstructured meshes, with triangular cells included only to join quadrilateral patches of differt resolution or instead of strongly deformed quadrilateral cells. The description of the model numerical part is complemented by test cases illustrating the model performance.