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Tsunami waveform inversion of the 2021 Loyalty Islands earthquake and implications for tsunami forecasting for New Zealand
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  • Aditya Gusman,
  • William Power,
  • Jean Roger,
  • Bill Fry
Aditya Gusman
GNS Science

Corresponding Author:a.gusman@gns.cri.nz

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William Power
GNS Science-Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences Ltd
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Jean Roger
GNS Science
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Bill Fry
GNS Science
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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.