Carte di inondazione dovute a tsunami mediante il GIS GRASS: applicazione all’isola di St. Lucia, Caraibi

This work shows the application and the validation of a procedure with the GIS GRASS to realize tsunami inundation maps based on the morphological characteristics, the vegetation and the settlements of the analyzed coast. Such a procedure, already illustrated in the VII GRASS Italian Users Meeting, and then improved, allows the estimation of the maximum vertical height of the tsunami waves hitting the coast (run-up) and the subsequent diffusion over the inland areas, as a function of the morphology, the vegetation, and the urbanization of the coastal area. The model, already successfully applied for the ligurian coast, has to be tested in different areas in order to validate a global applicability. For this reason the selected case study was the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. Based on elevation data, land-use, coast-line, observations, and studies, the methodology was applied and the inundation maps for three different event were estimated. The results compared historical data and other estimates, verifying the general validity of the method.