Dr. Randy LeVeque presents "Generating Random Earthquakes for Probabilistic Hazard Assessment." Please join us for refreshments at 2:45pm.

Probabilistic Tsunami Hazard Assessment (PTHA) is typically performed by first defining a set of potential earthquakes, with associated annual probabilities, and then running a tsunami model on each potential source. The results are combined into hazard maps for a particular community of interest. Recent work on this topic will be discussed, including use of a Karhunen-Loeve expansion to generate random slip patterns on a fault of arbitrary shape with a specified spatial correlation, and efficient approaches to exploring this high-dimensional stochastic space.

Randy LeVeque received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford in 1982 and has been at the University of Washington since 1985, where he is Professor of Applied Mathematics and Adjunct Professor of Mathematics and of Earth and Space Sciences. He is a lead developer of the Clawpack and GeoClaw software packages, and the author of three books on numerical methods for differential equations. Current research interests are focused on algorithm and software development, particularly for geophysical flow problems, and on development of probabilistic hazard assessment techniques. He is a Fellow of SIAM and the American Mathematical Society.