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Multi-site testing of stochastic earthquake tsunami models at Australian tide-gauges

Created 17/10/2025

Updated 17/10/2025

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Hazardous tsunamis are rare in Australia but could be generated by several mechanisms, including large plate-boundary earthquakes in locations that efficiently direct wave energy to our coast. With few hours between detection and tsunami arrival, prior planning is important to guide emergency response and risk mitigation. This drives interest in tsunami hazard information; which areas could be inundated, how likely, and how confident can we be? In practice the hazard is uncertain because historical records are short relative to tsunami frequencies, while long-term sedimentary records are sparse. Hazard assessments thus often follow a probabilistic approach where many alternative tsunami scenarios are simulated and assigned uncertain occurrence rates. This relies on models of stochastic earthquakes and their occurrence rates, which are not standardised, but depend on the scenario earthquake magnitude and other information from the source region. In this study we test three different stochastic tsunami models from the 2018 Australian Probabilistic Tsunami Hazard Assessment (PTHA18), an open-source database of earthquake-tsunami scenarios and return periods. The three models are tested against observations from twelve historical tsunamis at multiple tide gauges in Australia. For each historical tsunami, and each of the three models, sixty scenarios with similar earthquake location and magnitude are sampled from the PTHA18 database. A nonlinear shallow water model is used to simulate their effects at tide gauges in NSW, Victoria and Western Australia. The performance and statistical biases of the three models are assessed by comparing observations with the 60 modelled scenarios, over twelve separate tsunamis. Presented at the 30th Conference of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (AMOS) 2024.

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Field Value
Title Multi-site testing of stochastic earthquake tsunami models at Australian tide-gauges
Language eng
Licence Not Specified
Landing Page https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/c307174e-bc3e-4fd1-95af-a02c0e4ebd20
Contact Point
Geoscience Australia Data
clientservices@ga.gov.au
Reference Period 31/07/2024
Geospatial Coverage
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors
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      ],
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}
Data Portal Geoscience Australia

Data Source

This dataset was originally found on Geoscience Australia "Multi-site testing of stochastic earthquake tsunami models at Australian tide-gauges". Please visit the source to access the original metadata of the dataset:
https://ecat.ga.gov.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/csw/dataset/multi-site-testing-of-stochastic-earthquake-tsunami-models-at-australian-tide-gauges