A semi-empirical approach for tsunami inundation: An application to the
coasts of South Italy
Abstract
Tsunamis in the Mediterranean Sea have been increasingly investigated in
the last decades due to past destructive events. We present a novel
approach for evaluating tsunami-induced coastal inundation, based on a
generalization of Green’s law and a chain of intermediate and
small-scale numerical simulations. At the intermediate level,
simulations with a linear solver are made to identify the coastal
distribution of a novel parameter, namely α, condensing all nearshore
wave transformations other than shoaling. α represents a proxy for
coastal susceptibility to the tsunami impact. Small-scale modelling of
coastal flooding performed in the southern Italy on a freely available
DTM at the Esaro river estuary (Calabria) yields inundation levels that
compare well with those obtained via intermediate-scale modelling, with
a saving in computational time of about 41%. This demonstrates the
helpfulness of α to “scale” the offshore wave input and reduce the
computational effort to evaluate flooding at regional scale.