Cliffs is a numerical model for simulating tsunami propagation and land inundation.

Cliffs propagation algorithm is based on a numerical scheme developed at the Novosibirsk Computing Center of the Siberian Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1984-1989, also adopted by a more known model MOST (Titov, Kanoglu, Synolakis, 2016).
This algorithm solves the fully nonlinear shallow-water equations by applying dimensional splitting to reduce the original 2-D problem to two sequential 1-D problems, and solves each 1-D problem in a characteristics form using an explicit finite-difference scheme.
An original algorithm was developed to compute reflection and land inundation (Tolkova, 2014).
Runup onto a lab model of Monai Beach, computed with Cliffs

Cliffs Features:


Shallow-Water approximation with an option to manipulate numerical dispersion

Use of Cartesian or spherical (lon/lat) coordinates

1D and 2D configurations, including 1-D channels with varying width - domain type is detected automatically

Structured colocated grid with (optionally) varying spacing

Runup on land

Variety of starting/forcing options: bottom deformation, surface deformation, boundary input, or combination of those

Output options: various

Grid nesting with one-way coupling

Parallelized with OpenMP

NetCDF format of input/output data
Source Code - updated on Jan 22, 2016

Cliffs User Manual

Browse Cliffs Benchmarking with NTHMP Benchmark Problems

Misc:

 Modeling Example 1
(Runup onto a sloping beach)

Runup onto beach: 0.0185d (QuickTime mov) 		Modeling Example 2
(Hokkaido 1993 (Okushiri) Tsunami)

Runup onto beach: 0.3d (QuickTime mov)

Utilities:

 NetCDF QuickLook Plugin for Mac

DEM converter: ARC ascii to NetCDF

References:

 E. Tolkova. Land-Water Boundary Treatment for a Tsunami Model With Dimensional Splitting
Pure and Applied Geophysics, Vol. 171, Issue 9 (2014), pp. 2289-2314

Cliffs Spotlight on CSDMS

E. Tolkova Comparative simulations of the 2011 Tohoku tsunami with MOST and Cliffs ArXiv, 2013

E. Tolkova Cliffs Benchmarking ArXiv, 2016

Copyright:

 Cliffs is copyrighted under the terms of FreeBSD (2-Clause) License