TSUNAMIS IN NEW CALEDONIA


PROJECT SUMMARY
Background: Due to its geographical position, New Caledonia is exposed to tsunamis from all over the Pacific Ring of Fire, from Chile to Japan, through Vanuatu, Fiji and the Solomon Islands. IRD, with the support of the New Caledonian government, launched the TSUCAL project in 2018 to assess the tsunami hazard in the archipelago as accurately as possible in order to quickly provide the necessary information to the relevant authorities.

Objective: Update the tsunami hazard assessment tools in New Caledonia to improve the warning system for populations

Process: The validation of the modeling codes Method Of Splitting Tsunami - MOST (Titov, V. V. & Gonzalez, F. I., 1997) and Semi-implicit Cross-scale Hydroscience Integrated System Model - SCHISM (Zhang, Y. & Baptista A. M., 2008) allowed to simulate several tsunami scenarios both historical and fictitious. It is now necessary to model in an automated way hundreds of pre-calculated tsunamigenic seismic rupture scenarios at different spatial resolution levels. The results of these models will then be stored in a computer database. They will be used to produce tsunami hazard maps compiled in an atlas and made available to the New Caledonian Civil Security (DSCGR).