Meteotsunamis at global scale: problems of event identification, parameterization and cataloguing
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Meteotsunamis at global scale: problems of event identification, parameterization and cataloguing Viacheslav K. Gusiakov1 Received: 2 July 2020 / Accepted: 11 August 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Meteorological tsunamis (meteotsunamis) are defined as anomalous long-period (2 to 120 min) sea-level oscillations resulting from atmospheric forcing. In the current version of the Global Historical Tsunami Database covering almost 4000 years and including about 2500 tsunamis and tsunami-like events, meteotsunamis constitute a very small fraction of all events (4.1%). In the twenty-first century, when digital instruments for sea-level recording became widely available, identified meteotsunamis still only constitute 5.8% of all catalogued tsunami events. At the same time, there are many regions (Great Lakes, northeastern Gulf of Mexico, US East coast, southern Britain, Balearic Islands, Adriatic Sea, Yellow Sea, south-west coast of Japan, south-east coast of Brazil), where meteotsunamis dominate over all the other types of tsunamigenic events. Cataloguing of meteotsunami events, as reported in mass media, and described in scientific publications, faces the problems of their correct parameterization within the adopted format of the tsunami database. This format was developed in the late 1980s primarily for parameterization of seismogenic tsunamis, which at that time constituted more than 90% of the database’s content. As a result, most of the meteotsunamis included in the database lack some basic parameters, such as time of origin, location of source as well as run-up heights. The present paper addresses these issues and discusses the ways for their possible resolution. Several well-known cases of recent meteotsunamis are considered from the standpoint of their parameterization and hazard assessment. Keywords Tsunami · Meteotsunamis · Seiches · Storm surges · Rogue waves · Historical catalogs · Parameterization · Databases · Data formats
1 Introduction Among the numerous definitions of meteotsunamis given in recent research and review papers, the best, probably, is the shortest: “Meteotsunamis are atmospherically-induced destructive long ocean waves in the tsunami frequency band” (Vilibić et al. 2020). Despite * Viacheslav K. Gusiakov [email protected] 1
Institute of Computational Mathematics and Mathematical Geophysics SD RAS, Novosibirsk, Russia 630090
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its brevity, this definition correctly points out the three main features of meteotsunamis: a frequency band that coincides with that of ordinary (tectonic) tsunamis, their destructive potential, and their relation to atmospheric forcing. However, there is yet another important characteristic of meteotsunamis that is omitted by this definition, namely the resonance nature of their generation process which profoundly distinguishes meteotsunamis from other types of tsunamis (seismogenic, volcanic, landslide-generated). A meteotsunami is an anomalous sea-level phenomenon that occurs at some coastal locations under specif
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