Numerical modeling of the 2015 Illapel Tsunami source by the inversion of DART buoys data

Abstract

The problem of the tsunami source reconstruction from the remote measurements of an arriving waves in the deep-water tsunamimeters is considered as an inverse problem of mathematical physics in the class of the ill-posed problems. The latter determines the inevitable instability of the numerical solution. We propose a method providing more control on the numerical instability of the solution. The DART buoys data allows one to apply the linear shallow-water theory for the wave propagation and the r-solution method for the tsunami waveform inversion. The applied approach is independent from the earthquake source characteristics, because the only observed tsunami waveforms and a roughly estimated tsunami source area are used. A good coincidence of observed and computed tsunami waveforms was a criterion of the quality of the inversion. In this paper we study the 16 September 2015 Illapel (Chile) event and conduct a reconstruction of a tsunami source.