Hi - a little bit of background...
It is a work in progress and the aim of this application is not to be a 100% reliable scientific simulation, but more a general guide to see which areas are most likely to be affected by a tsunami. Some places don't have the budget to run a big study on the local effects of tsunamis (much less the budget to build 15m walls!) and one of my goals here is to give a cheap way to start. Plus some people find is entertaining for 10 mins Accurate tsunami threat modelling requires a super computer, very detailed topo information and knowledge of the terrain, and (as you say) knowledge of walls etc built to keep big waves out. which is not really going to be practical on a site like this.
However, if someone really wanted to really be harsh, my main limitation here is lack of a energy model. That is the current model just uses elevation vs wave height, range and the flood fill algorithm (ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_fill) to determine inundation. This is simple but gets the current limited results. In reality a low wave with high energy could rise several meters above its original height whereas a low energy but high wave may only go a short distance inland after losing its energy to the terrain or just running out of volume.
Maybe someone in this group can suggest a simple but accurate way to do this? The algorithm has access to the topo information over a grid, we can prompt the users for any number of parameters (speed, volume etc.) and I'm looking for a simple computation model to determine inundation from this.
