Simulation of the 2004 tsunami of Les Saintes in Guadeloupe (Lesser Antilles) using new source constraints

The arc of the Lesser Antilles is associated with a significant tectonic activity due to the subduction of the Atlantic oceanic plate under the Caribbean plate. Earthquakes in this context have the potential to trigger landslides and tsunamis due to the important vertical seafloor displacement. The historical tsunamigenic earthquakes in this region are rare, but the damages they may have generated before along the coasts show that they pose a considerable threat to the closest inhabited islands. The most recent tsunamigenic earthquake occurred in 2004 in the area of Les Saintes, along a normal fault system located in the back-arc of the subduction. This $$M_{w}=6.3$$ M w = 6.3 earthquake generated small waves with 2 m of run-up in several bays of Les Saintes, a group of islands in the South of Guadeloupe. A recent survey conducted in the source area using deep-sea vehicles revealed for the first time an important coseismic slip on the Roseau fault plane, attributed to the 2004 event, which had not been predicted in the seismic inversion models. This event and the dataset on the Roseau fault gives the opportunity to model precisely the earthquake, to compare the simulation results with the observations and to evaluate the impact of the rupture heterogeneity and rupture shallowness on the height of the tsunami waves. Extending our earlier work (Cordrie et al. in OCEANS 2019—Marseille, Jun 2019, Marseille, France, pp 1–9, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1109/OCEANSE.2019.8867447 ) and in order to avoid a loss of quality from the dataset in the modeling of the initial sea-surface deformation especially in shallow depth and near field context, a transfer function of the deformation from the seafloor to the sea surface and different numerical schemes were used. Results on the tsunami height distribution indicate some local tsunami amplification phenomena linked to the bathymetry or the coastline geometry and highlight the most endangered areas of the islands. The simulations give additional constraints on the source, show the impact of the slip heterogeneities on the tsunami and finally provide a complementary estimation of the 2004 coseismic slip intensity.