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A semi-empirical approach for tsunami inundation: An application to the coasts of South Italy
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  • Lorenzo Melito,
  • Francesco Lalli,
  • Matteo Postacchini,
  • Maurizio Brocchini
Lorenzo Melito
Università Politecnica delle Marche

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Francesco Lalli
ISPRA
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Matteo Postacchini
Università Politecnica delle Marche
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Maurizio Brocchini
Università Politecnica delle Marche
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Abstract

Tsunamis in the Mediterranean Sea have been increasingly investigated in the last decades due to past destructive events. We present a novel approach for evaluating tsunami-induced coastal inundation, based on a generalization of Green’s law and a chain of intermediate and small-scale numerical simulations. At the intermediate level, simulations with a linear solver are made to identify the coastal distribution of a novel parameter, namely α, condensing all nearshore wave transformations other than shoaling. α represents a proxy for coastal susceptibility to the tsunami impact. Small-scale modelling of coastal flooding performed in the southern Italy on a freely available DTM at the Esaro river estuary (Calabria) yields inundation levels that compare well with those obtained via intermediate-scale modelling, with a saving in computational time of about 41%. This demonstrates the helpfulness of α to “scale” the offshore wave input and reduce the computational effort to evaluate flooding at regional scale.