Tsunami waveform inversion of the 2021 Loyalty Islands earthquake and
implications for tsunami forecasting for New Zealand
Abstract
A tsunamigenic earthquake occurred in the Southern New Hebrides
subduction zone on the 10th of February 2021. The
tsunami was observed at coastal gauges in the islands around the source
area, and at a new DART buoy network that was designed to enhance the
tsunami forecasting capability of the Southwestern Pacific (Fig.1). 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 (Fig.2). The computed seismic moment for
the source model of 3.39 × 1020 Nm (Mw 7.65) is
consistent with the Global Centroid Moment Tensor and USGS W-phase
Moment Tensor solutions. The estimated slip distribution (Fig.2a) was
then used as reference model to evaluate our tsunami forecasting
methods. We have developed a database of threat level maps for tsunami
warning regions along the coast of New Zealand from earthquake scenarios
with magnitudes ranging from 6.9 to 9.3 around the Pacific Ocean.
Tsunami heights in coastal regions can be obtained by interpolating
pre-computed results from selected scenarios around the earthquake
location. The pre-computed waveforms can also be interpolated and then
compared with the observation to verify the tsunami forecast. We found
that the interpolated tsunami waveforms at the DART stations match the
observations better than the waveforms from the pre-computed scenarios.
We used the pre-computed scenarios to obtain a collection of B values
that are required to enable the calculation of tsunami magnitude from
tsunami observations observations (following the methods originally
developed by Abe (1979) and extended by Baba et al. (2004)). A tsunami
magnitude of Mt 7.72 was obtained from the tsunami peak amplitudes
recorded at DARTs NZC, E, G, I along the Hikurangi-Kermadec-Tonga
subduction zone. The tsunami magnitude was then used to predict tsunami
heights in the tsunami warning regions. The predicted tsunami threat
levels from both interpolation and tsunami magnitude methods can match
those from the reference map in most of the warning regions.