Simulation of tsunami impact on Taiwan coastal area

The tsunami disaster triggered by a huge 9.0 magnitude earthquake strikes Japan on March 11th, 2011. It motivates us to get involved in a research work in tsunami topics of Taiwan and to simulate an impact of the tsunami on the coast of Taiwan. Tsunami propagation is often modeled by the shallow water equations. These equations are derived from conservation of mass and momentum equations. By adding friction slope to the conservation of momentum equations, it enables the system to simulate the propagation over the coastal area. This system is able to estimate inundation zone caused by the tsunami. By applying Neumann boundary condition and Hansen numerical filter, it brings more interesting complexities into this simulation system. The parallelizable two-step finite-difference MacCormack scheme is employed to simulate the tsunami. In this paper, the parallel implementation of the MacCormack scheme is proposed for the shallow water equations by using the modern graphics processing unit (GPU) which accommodates NVIDIA compute unified device architecture (CUDA) technology to speed up the computation of the assessment of tsunami inundation. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is an effective simulation method for evaluating the impact on land inundation in Taiwan coastal area. With this method, we can in real-time manner monitor the progress of the land inundation. The information is valuable for constructing and refining the further altering systems in a dynamic manner for minimizing impacts caused by tsunamis.