The NEAM Tsunami Hazard Model 2018 (NEAMTHM18) is a probabilistic hazard model for tsunamis generated by earthquakes. It covers the coastlines of the North-eastern Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and connected seas (NEAM). NEAMTHM18 was designed as a three-phase project. The first two phases were dedicated to the model development and hazard calculations, following a formalized decision-making process based on a multiple-expert protocol. The third phase was dedicated to documentation and dissemination. The hazard assessment workflow was structured in Steps and Levels. There are four Steps: Step-1) probabilistic earthquake model; Step-2) tsunami generation and modeling in deep water; Step-3) shoaling and inundation; Step-4) hazard aggregation and uncertainty quantification. Each Step includes a different number of Levels. Level-0 always describes the input data; the other Levels describe the intermediate results needed to proceed from one Step to another. Alternative datasets and models were considered in the implementation. The epistemic hazard uncertainty was quantified through an ensemble modeling technique accounting for alternative models’ weights and yielding a distribution of hazard curves represented by the mean and various percentiles. Hazard curves were calculated at 2,343 Points of Interest (POI) distributed at an average spacing of ∼20 km. Precalculated probability maps for five maximum inundation heights (MIH) and hazard intensity maps for five average return periods (ARP) were produced from hazard curves. In the entire NEAM Region, MIHs of several meters are rare but not impossible. Considering a 2% probability of exceedance in 50 years (ARP≈2,475 years), the POIs with MIH >5 m are fewer than 1% and are all in the Mediterranean on Libya, Egypt, Cyprus, and Greece coasts. In the North-East Atlantic, POIs with MIH >3 m are on the coasts of Mauritania and Gulf of Cadiz. Overall, 30% of the POIs have MIH >1 m. NEAMTHM18 results and documentation are available through the TSUMAPS-NEAM project website (http://www.tsumaps-neam.eu/), featuring an interactive web mapper. Although the NEAMTHM18 cannot substitute in-depth analyses at local scales, it represents the first action to start local and more detailed hazard and risk assessments and contributes to designing evacuation maps for tsunami early warning.

The Tsunami-HySEA model is used to perform some of the numerical benchmark problems proposed and documented in the “Proceedings and results of the 2011 NTHMP Model Benchmarking Workshop”. The final aim is to obtain the approval for Tsunami-HySEA to be used in projects funded by the National Tsunami Hazard Mitigation Program (NTHMP). Therefore, this work contains the numerical results and comparisons for the five benchmark problems (1, 4, 6, 7, and 9) required for such aim. This set of benchmarks considers analytical, laboratory, and field data test cases. In particular, the analytical solution of a solitary wave runup on a simple beach, and its laboratory counterpart, two more laboratory tests: the runup of a solitary wave on a conically shaped island and the runup onto a complex 3D beach (Monai Valley) and, finally, a field data benchmark based on data from the 1993 Hokkaido Nansei-Oki tsunami.

This article is devoted to the numerical solution of the inviscid two-layer shallow water system. This system may lose the hyperbolic character when the shear between the layer is big enough. This loss of hyperbolicity is related to the appearance of shear instabilities that leads, in real flows, to intense mixing of the two layers that the model is not able to simulate. The strategy here is to add some extra friction terms, which are supposed to parameterize the loss of mechanical energy due to mixing, to get rid of this difficulty. The main goal is to introduce a technique allowing one to add locally and automatically an ‘optimal’ amount of shear stress to make the flow to remain in the hyperbolicity region. To do this, first an easy criterium to check the hyperbolicity of the system for a given state is proposed and checked. Next, we introduce a predictor/corrector strategy. In the predictor stage, a numerical scheme is applied to the system without extra friction. In the second stage, a discrete semi-implicit linear friction law is applied at any cell in which the predicted states are not in the hyperbolicity region. The coefficient of this law is calculated so that the predicted states are driven to the boundary of the hyperbolicity region according to the proposed criterium. The numerical scheme to be used at the first stage has to be able to advance in time in presence of complex eigenvalues: we propose here a family of path-conservative numerical scheme having this property. Finally, some numerical tests have been performed to assess the efficiency of the proposed strategy.