Coupled dynamic earthquake rupture-tsunami modeling for the Hellenic Arc - towards physics-based tsunami hazard assessment in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea

The Hellenic Arc is an active seismotectonic zone (Papadopoulos et al., 2010) sourcing several destructive tsunamis devastating the Mediterranean coasts in the past (Gailler et al., 2016). For tsunami early warning and hazard assessment, data-driven kinematic models of fault slip are often translated into static seafloor displacement (Okada, 1985). However, in these models the slip distribution is often highly non-unique (Mai et al., 2016) and time-dependent effects are neglected. Dynamic rupture models can provide physically consistent and time dependent slip distribution across complex fault networks. The resulting seafloor displacement can then be used to source tsunamis highlighting complex earthquake-tsunami interaction (Ulrich et al., 2019, Amlani et al., 2020). Previous tsunami models sourced by 3D dynamic rupture models typically link to the shallow water equations to simulate the ocean waves. Fully coupled approaches model earthquakes, acoustic waves and tsunamis simultaneously by accounting for compressibility, gravity and elasticity (Lotto and Dunham, 2018; Lotto et al., 2017). Recently, this coupling approach was successfully implemented in SeisSol (www.seissol.org), a flagship code of the ChEESE project (www.cheese-coe.eu).