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Quantification of Tsunami Bathymetry Effect on Finite Fault Slip Inversion

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Abstract

The strong development of tsunami instrumentation in the past decade now provides observations of tsunami wave propagation in most ocean basins. This evolution has led to the wide use of tsunami data to image the complexity of earthquake sources. In particular, the 2011 Mw9.0 Tohoku-Oki earthquake is the first mega-event for which such a tsunami instrumentation network was available with an almost complete azimuthal coverage. Source inversion studies have taken advantage of these observations which add a lot of constrain on the solutions, especially in the shallow part of the fault models where other standard data sets tend to lack resolution: while on-land data are quite insensitive to slip on the often-distant shallow part of a subduction fault interface, tsunami observations are directly sensitive to the shallowest slip. And it is in this shallow portion that steep bathymetry combined with horizontal motion, the so-called bathymetry effect, can contribute to the tsunami excitation, in addition to the direct vertical sea-bottom deformation. In this study, we carefully investigate the different steps involved in the calculation of this bathymetry effect, from the initial sea-floor deformation to the prediction of the tsunami records, and evaluate its contribution across the main subduction zones of the world. We find that the bathymetry effect locally exceeds 10 % of the tsunami excitation in all subduction zones and 25 % in those known to produce the largest tsunami, either from mega- or tsunami- earthquakes. We then show how the bathymetry effect can modify the tsunami wave predictions, with time shifts of the wavefront and amplitudes sometimes varying by a factor of two. If the bathymetry effect can have a strong impact on the simulated tsunami, it will also affect the solution of the finite-fault slip inversion. We illustrate this later aspect in the case of the Tohoku-Oki earthquake. We find that not accounting for the bathymetry effect will not necessarily cause strong variations in the spatial extent of the inferred coseismic rupture but can severely distort the solution. We also find that the bathymetry effect improves the consistency of the slip model inverted from tsunami data with seafloor geodesy observations, implying that taking the bathymetry effect into account reduces the epistemic uncertainties on tsunami modeling. Implementing this easily quantifiable effect in the tsunami early warning system could thus lead to improved estimates of the tsunami impact across ocean basins.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Ocean Wave Information network for Ports and HArbourS (NOWPHAS), Agency for Marine-Earth Science and TEChnology (JAMSTEC) for their valuable data. This work was granted access to the HPC and visualization resources of “Centre de Calcul Interactif” hosted by “Université Nice Sophia Antipolis” and partly supported by the French National Research Agency (ANR) TO-EOS project ANR-11-JAPN-008, the French ministry of research and higher education, the University Nice Sophia Antipolis and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). We are grateful to Dr Y. Yamazaki for providing his tsunami simulation code NEOWAVE and for his valuable comments.

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  1. CNRS, IRD, Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, Géoazur UMR 7329, Univ. Nice Sophia Antipolis, 250 rue Albert Einstein, Sophia Antipolis, 06560, Valbonne, France

    Quentin Bletery, Anthony Sladen, Bertrand Delouis & Lionel Mattéo

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  1. Quentin Bletery
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Correspondence to Quentin Bletery.

Electronic supplementary material

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

24_2015_1113_MOESM1_ESM.eps

Supplementary material 1 (EPS 75270 kb) Figure S1. BE due to 1 m homogeneous slip on the megathrusts of the main subduction zones of the world.

24_2015_1113_MOESM2_ESM.eps

Supplementary material 2 (EPS 3604 kb) Figure S2. 3D fault discretization used in our joint inversion built to follow Hayes et al. [2012]’s slab localization. Each point represents the center of sub-faults. Special care is given to the shallow part because of tsunami near-field sensitivity. Top edges of sub-faults along the trench all match the free surface at the trench depth.

24_2015_1113_MOESM3_ESM.eps

Supplementary material 3 (EPS 8587 kb) Figure S3. a) Slip inversion inferred from tsunami data computed with GF considering BE. b) Same slip inversion computed with GF not including BE. Red star is hypocenter location (see text). Near-field tsunami stations are shown as triangles: blue are GPS buoys, red are pressure gauges, yellow are cables. DARTs locations are shown in Figure 6. Slip directions on each sub-faults are indicated by white arrows.

24_2015_1113_MOESM4_ESM.eps

Supplementary material 4 (EPS 4954 kb) Figure S4 Sensitivity map of tsunami GF. Color is proportional to the weighted root mean square (see weight description in table 1) of the computed GF time series for each sub-fault. We find a factor 8 between the most and the least sensitive sub-faults. Note that timing and frequency also have important impact on the inherent sensitivity of the different parts of the fault but are not reflected in this test and figure.

24_2015_1113_MOESM5_ESM.eps

Supplementary material 5 (EPS 16981 kb) Figure S5. Cumulative rupture snapshots with 10 s time windows obtained by slip inversion accounting for BE during the first 140 s.

24_2015_1113_MOESM6_ESM.eps

Supplementary material 6 (EPS 5843 kb) FigureS6. a) Sea surface deformation associated with model NOBE. b) Sea surface deformation associated with model BE. c) Difference between a) and b).

24_2015_1113_MOESM7_ESM.eps

Supplementary material 7 (EPS 12200 kb) Figure S7. Tsunami response to target patchwork (a) is computed considering BE. b) Recovered patchwork obtained by inversion of these synthetic data considering GF calculated using BE. c) Recovered patchwork of the same synthetic data but inverted with GF calculated not considering BE. We see that the patchwork is recovered in each case, but with important amplitude discrepancy in the Northern shallow part when neglecting BE.

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Bletery, Q., Sladen, A., Delouis, B. et al. Quantification of Tsunami Bathymetry Effect on Finite Fault Slip Inversion. Pure Appl. Geophys. 172, 3655–3670 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00024-015-1113-y

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