Speeding up and boosting tsunami warning in Chile

Chile host a great tsunamigenic potential along its coast, even with the large earthquakes occurred during the last decade, there is still a large amount of seismic energy to release. This permanent feature and the fact that the distance between the trench and the coast is just 100 km creates a difficult environment to do real time tsunami forecast. In Chile tsunami warnings are based on reports of the seismic events (hypocenter and magnitude) and a database of precomputed tsunami scenarios. However, because yet there is no answer to image the finite fault model within first minutes (before the first tsunami wave arrival), the precomputed scenarios consider uniform slip distributions. Here, we propose a scheme of processes to fill the gaps in-between blind zones due to waiting of demanding computational stages. The linear shallow water equations are solved to obtain a rapid estimation of the run-up distribution in the near field. Our results show that this linear method captures most of the complexity of the run-up heights in terms of shape and amplitude when compared with a fully non-linear tsunami code. Also, the run-up distribution is obtained in quasi real-time as soon as the seismic finite fault model is produced.