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Overview
In June 2010 Geoscience Australia delivered the Tsunami Data Access Tool (TsuDAT1.0) to emergency managers in Australian Jurisdictions. The tool allows users to visually interrogate the outputs from the Probabilistic Tsunami Hazard Assessment of Australia (Burbidge 2010). Specifically it allows the user to select an offshore hazard point near their community of interest and then to explore their hazard for different return periods and identify which sources contribute to the hazard for that community. The user can then select an event from a particular source and output tsunami waveforms offshore from that community. These tsunami waveforms can then be imported into a detailed inundation model outside of the TsuDAT1.0 software to model the onshore tsunami inundation. At present TsuDAT is located on a portable hard drive that is distributed to users.
The next steps in the development of TsuDAT2.0 are to include an inundation modelling capability within the system and to create a web interface for the tool to allow it to be hosted on a public or local webserver.
The purpose of TsuDAT2.0 is to create an easy to use web based tool to allow detailed tsunami inundation hazard maps to be created for coastal communities. It is envisioned that any scientist or technically minded person will be able to use TsuDAT2.0, and the outputs will be utilised by disaster managers at the national, province and district level to develop evacuation maps for communities.
Detailed tsunami inundation hazard maps are critical in the development of evacuation plans. Traditionally to create a tsunami inundation map the tsunami is modelled from the source to the community of interest using anywhere from one to three different models for a single tsunami scenario. The consequences of this is that a high level of technical knowledge of earthquake sources and tsunami modelling is required and therefore only a few communities have so far had inundation maps developed.
The development of TsuDAT2.0 will provide an easy to use web based tool to allow not only tsunami experts, but also others such as spatial scientists and coastal engineers, to develop tsunami inundation hazard maps for their communities of interest. By making tsunami inundation modelling more accessible it is hoped that hazard maps and evacuation maps can be created for a much larger number of communities, increasing the number of communities that are tsunami ready with evacuation plans in place.
One of the critical requirements for tsunami inundation modelling is the availability of high quality elevation data. Once this elevation data is available for a community of interest the data can be imported into TsuDAT2.0 and inundation modelling can be conducted. To combat mis- use of the tool (e.g. it being run with poor quality data), an accompanying document will outline the minimum elevation data requirements for tsunami inundation modelling. The tool will also require the user to confirm that these data requirements have been met.
The inundation modelling in TsuDAT2.0 will be done using ANUGA, a free and open source hydrodynamic modelling tool written in Python (http://sourceforge.net/projects/anuga/). ANUGA has a powerful library of tools that can be utilised to prepare and process input data for modelling.