TsunamiSimulator

    

A scientifically grounded 3D-globe desktop application for simulating tsunami generation, propagation, and coastal inundation from asteroid impacts, nuclear detonations (atmospheric and underwater), seafloor earthquakes, and subaerial landslides — with peer-reviewed historical presets like Chicxulub (66 Ma), Tōhoku 2011, Indian Ocean 2004, and Lituya Bay 1958.

This is the NukeMap for tsunamis — but with a real 3D bathymetric globe, real shallow-water physics, and presets you can scrub through frame-by-frame.

Visual tour

Historical preset + source readout	Live SWE playback

Side-by-side comparison	Scenario builder + globe pick	Citations

Why this exists

Existing tools each do one piece:

• NukeMap — nuclear airburst effects only, 2D map, no water.
• Asteroid Launcher — fun, 2D map, no propagating tsunami.
• Purdue "Impact: Earth!" — accurate formulas, single-point readout, no animation.
• GeoClaw / COMCOT / MOST — operational accuracy, Fortran/Python, no consumer UI.

TsunamiSimulator combines them: NOAA-grade physics + consumer-grade interactive globe. Pick a source (asteroid, nuke, fault, slide), drop it anywhere on Earth, and watch a real shallow-water solution propagate over GEBCO bathymetry, run up real coastlines, and produce inundation polygons.

Features (current build + roadmap)

Source models (energy → initial water-surface displacement)

Propagation

• ✅ Linear long-wave (deep-ocean, fast preview).
• ✅ Shallow-water equations — depth-averaged 2D leapfrog with rayon row-parallel updates, Manning bottom friction, CFL-safe Δt, snapshots rendered as PNG overlays on the Cesium globe.
• 🔲 Boussinesq for dispersive waves (impact-tsunami wavelengths shorter than ocean depth — important for Ward–Asphaug regime).
• 🔲 Adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) like GeoClaw — coarse far-field, fine coastal.
• ✅ GPU compute via wgpu behind the gpu feature flag, with CPU fallback when no adapter is available.

Coastal inundation

• ✅ Synolakis 1987 runup law sampled at 60+ named coastal points, rendered as colour-graded 3D bars on the globe.
• 🔲 MOST-style wetting/drying on bathymetric grid.
• ✅ First-order inundation discs from runup/slope estimates.
• 🔲 Real flood polygons rendered as GeoJSON overlays on Cesium.

Presets (historical events with peer-reviewed parameters)

UX

• 5 globe styles: OpenStreetMap (default, no token), Esri World Imagery, Natural Earth II (offline), Cesium World Imagery, Cesium World Bathymetry.
• Scenario builder — tabbed Asteroid / Nuclear / Earthquake / Landslide forms; click-globe-to-pick location.
• Timeline scrubber + SWE playback — scrub a 24-frame snapshot sequence through the live shallow-water solver.
• Effect overlays — wavefront ring, coastal runup bars at 60+ named coastal points, DART buoy historical observations for the three modern presets.
• Side-by-side comparison mode — two scenarios on synchronised globes.
• Catppuccin Mocha dark theme default + Latte light theme toggle.

Install

Prebuilt installers for the latest release are on the Releases page — Windows (.msi, .exe), macOS universal (.dmg), and Linux (.AppImage, .deb, .rpm).

The app launches on the no-token OpenStreetMap globe by default and is fully usable out of the box. A free Cesium ion token (optional) unlocks high-resolution satellite imagery + GEBCO bathymetric terrain from the Settings dialog.

Build from source

Prerequisites:

• Node.js ≥ 20 LTS
• Rust ≥ 1.78 (stable) with rustup
• Windows: Visual Studio 2022/2026 with "Desktop development with C++" workload (provides MSVC link.exe); WebView2 runtime (preinstalled on Win11)
• macOS: Xcode Command Line Tools
• Linux: libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev, libgtk-3-dev, libayatana-appindicator3-dev, librsvg2-dev, libsoup-3.0-dev

The Tauri CLI ships via the @tauri-apps/cli npm dev dependency — no separate cargo install step.

git clone https://github.com/SysAdminDoc/TsunamiSimulator
cd TsunamiSimulator
npm install
npm run dev                # browser preview with deterministic demo data
npm run tauri dev          # full desktop app with Rust/Tauri IPC
npm run tauri build        # platform installer(s) in src-tauri/target/release/bundle/

To bake a Cesium ion token at build time, cp .env.example .env and paste it in; otherwise leave it blank and paste at runtime in Settings.

Architecture

┌─────────────────────────── Tauri 2 Window ───────────────────────────┐
│ ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐  │
│ │  React 19 + TypeScript + Vite (frontend / WebView2)             │  │
│ │  ─ CesiumJS 1.124+ globe with GEBCO bathymetry                   │  │
│ │  ─ Scenario builder, timeline, overlays, results panel           │  │
│ └──────────────────────────────  ▲  ───────────────────────────────┘  │
│                                  │ tauri::invoke (JSON over IPC)      │
│ ┌──────────────────────────────  ▼  ───────────────────────────────┐  │
│ │  Rust backend (src-tauri/)                                       │  │
│ │  ─ physics::asteroid    Ward–Asphaug + Schmidt–Holsapple         │  │
│ │  ─ physics::nuclear     Glasstone–Dolan + Le Méhauté             │  │
│ │  ─ physics::landslide   Fritz–Hager + Slingerland–Voight         │  │
│ │  ─ physics::earthquake  Okada 1985 (planned)                     │  │
│ │  ─ physics::shallow_water  NSWE + Synolakis runup                │  │
│ │  ─ data::bathymetry     GEBCO 15-arcsec sampler                  │  │
│ │  ─ presets              Chicxulub / Tōhoku / Lituya / …          │  │
│ └──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘  │
└───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Heavy physics runs in the Rust backend (multi-threaded via rayon, GPU via wgpu planned). The frontend only handles globe rendering, controls, and result visualization. The IPC boundary keeps the WebView from blocking on million-cell SWE solves.

The science (and its limits)

This is not a forecast tool. Compared to operational models like NOAA MOST:

• What's accurate — initial conditions (cavity geometry from Ward–Asphaug, fault displacement from Okada), open-ocean propagation in deep water, far-field arrival times.
• What's approximate — coastal runup (we use Synolakis 1987 analytical instead of full wetting/drying), dispersion (linear long-wave first, Boussinesq later).
• What's wrong — anything involving the atmosphere coupling (Hunga Tonga–style Lamb-wave coupling is a research frontier), tsunami earthquake source-time functions (we use static dislocation), submarine landslide rheology.
• The "Russia Poseidon" honest take — Russian state media's 500-m-wave claim is propaganda. The 1996 Defense Nuclear Agency study put underwater-explosion wave-generation efficiency at ~5%. A 100-Mt warhead at 100 km open ocean produces a ~few-meter wave, not a city-killer. We model both the propaganda yield and a realistic one — the comparison is the point.

See `docs/science/` for formula derivations and citations.

Citations (anchors, full list in docs/science/REFERENCES.bib)

• Ward, S. N., & Asphaug, E. (2000). Asteroid impact tsunami: a probabilistic hazard assessment. Icarus, 145, 64–78.
• Range, M. M., et al. (2022). The Chicxulub Impact Produced a Powerful Global Tsunami. AGU Advances. https://doi.org/10.1029/2021AV000627
• Synolakis, C. E. (1987). The runup of solitary waves. J. Fluid Mech., 185, 523–545.
• Okada, Y. (1985). Surface deformation due to shear and tensile faults in a half-space. BSSA, 75, 1135–1154.
• Fritz, H. M., Hager, W. H., & Minor, H.-E. (2001). Lituya Bay case: rockslide impact and wave run-up. Sci. Tsunami Hazards, 19, 3–22.
• Glasstone, S., & Dolan, P. J. (1977). The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (3rd ed.). USDOE.
• Le Méhauté, B., & Wang, S. (1996). Water Waves Generated by Underwater Explosion. World Scientific.
• Collins, G. S., Melosh, H. J., & Marcus, R. A. (2005). Earth Impact Effects Program. Meteoritics & Planetary Science, 40, 817–840.
• Berger, M. J., George, D. L., LeVeque, R. J., & Mandli, K. T. (2011). The GeoClaw software for depth-averaged flows. Advances in Water Resources, 34(9), 1195–1206.

Roadmap & research

• `ROADMAP.md` — phased delivery plan (v0.1.0 → v1.0.0).
• `COMPLETED.md` — shipped feature summary.
• `RESEARCH_REPORT.md` — current research synthesis.
• `docs/history/` — archived research plans, including the v0.4.0 forward plan.

License

MIT. For scientific education and hazard-awareness visualization only. Not for evacuation planning. Use NOAA NTWC/PTWC for real warnings.

Author

@SysAdminDoc — Senior Systems Administrator, medical-imaging IT, side projects in physics-based simulators.