Home▸Fluid Dynamics & Aerodynamics▸Simulating Tsunamis: From Shallow-Water Equations to GPU-Accelerated Inundation Maps

🌊 Simulating Tsunamis: From Shallow-Water Equations to GPU-Accelerated Inundation Maps

Trigger a seafloor displacement, watch the wave shoal as it crosses the continental shelf, and see it run up the coastline — a live shallow-water finite-difference solver rendered in 3D.

Fluid Dynamics & Aerodynamics3DAdvanced60 FPS💧 Water

A live shallow-water finite-difference solver: trigger a seafloor displacement and watch the resulting wave cross an open basin, shoal as the seabed shallows, and run up a coastline whose slope you control.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

Wave speed c = √(g·H) falls as depth falls, forcing the wave to slow and stack up (shoal) near shore — the same mechanism that turns a barely-visible open-ocean tsunami into a destructive coastal wave.

🎮 How to Use

Set the seafloor displacement and ocean depth, choose a steep or gradual coastal slope, and trigger the tsunami. Toggle the adaptive-mesh overlay to see why coastal forecasting codes refine resolution only where the seabed changes fastest.

💡 Did You Know?

Operational systems like NOAA's MOST/ComMIT pre-compute thousands of scenarios offline so that, after a real earthquake, a forecast can be assembled by interpolation within minutes rather than by running a fresh simulation from scratch.

⚙ Under the hood

Trigger a seafloor displacement, watch the wave shoal as it crosses the continental shelf, and see it run up the coastline — a live shallow-water finite-difference solver rendered in 3D.

tsunamiwavesshallow waterfinite differencesimulationgpuphysicsoceanThree.js

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install