Modeling tsunami initial conditions due to rapid coseismic seafloor displacement: efficient numerical integration and a tool to build unit source databases

Abstract. The initial condition for the simulation of a seismically-induced tsunami for a rapid, assumed instantaneous, vertical seafloor displacement is given by the Kajiura low-pass filter integral. This work proposes a new efficient and accurate approach for its numerical evaluation, valid when the sea floor displacement is discretized as a set of rectangular contributions. We compare several truncated quadrature formulae, selecting the optimal one. We verify that we can satisfactorily approximate the initial sea level perturbation as a linear combination of those induced by the elementary sea floor displacements. The methodology is tested on the tsunamigenic Kuril earthquake doublet – a megathrust and an outer-rise – occurred in the Central Kuril Islands in late 2006 and early 2007. We also confirm the importance of the horizontal contribution to the tsunami generation and we consider a simple model of the inelastic deformation of the wedge, on a realistic bathymetry. The proposed approach results accurate and fast enough to be considered relevant for practical applications, and a tool is provided to create tsunami unit source databases for a given region of interest.