The 2021 Loyalty Island earthquake (Mw 7.7): tsunami waveform inversion
and implications for tsunami forecasting for New Zealand
Abstract
A tsunamigenic earthquake with thrust faulting mechanism occurred off
the Loyalty Islands, New Caledonia, in the Southern New Hebrides
subduction zone on the 10th of February 2021. The
tsunami was observed at coastal gauges in the surrounding islands and in
New Zealand. The tsunami was also recorded at a new DART network that
was designed to enhance the tsunami forecasting capability of the
Southwestern Pacific. We used the tsunami waveforms in an inversion to
estimate the fault slip distribution. The estimated major slip region is
located near the trench with maximum slip amount of 4 m. The computed
seismic moment for the source model of 3.39 × 1020 Nm
(Mw 7.65) is slightly smaller than the Global Centroid Moment Tensor or
USGS W-phase Moment Tensor solutions. We evaluate two tsunami
forecasting approaches of selecting a pre-computed scenario and
interpolating pre-computed scenarios for coastal regions in New Zealand.
For the evaluation, we first computed the tsunami threat levels in New
Zealand coastal regions from the earthquake source model to make a
reference threat level map. The results show that the tsunami threat
level maps from a pre-computed Mw 7.7 scenario located closest to the
epicenter and from an interpolation of two scenarios matched the
reference threat levels at most of the coastal regions. We also report
on utilization of the coastal gauge and DART buoy data for updating
forecasts in real-time during the event and discuss the differences
between the rapid-response forecast and post-event retrospective
forecasts.