Global science of meteotsunamis: from planetary to mesoscale processes
Principal investigator
Meteorological tsunamis - atmospheric ocean waves in the tsunami frequency band - and generally nonseismic sea level oscillations on tsunami timescales attracted a lot of attention in the recent decade, due to global availability of high-resolution sea level and ancillary measurements and advancement of both atmospheric and ocean models. This became even accentuated after the century-level event of the Hunga explosive volcano eruption in January 2022, that created global acoustic-gravity waves in the atmosphere and meteotsunamis in the ocean. Therefore, the GLOMETS proposal aims to advance the knowledge on both planetary meteotsunami events and local weather-generated sea level oscillations, gathering all available measurements and numerical tools in researching: (1) global meteotsunami hazards from explosive volcanic eruptions and asteroid impacts, (2) meteotsunami hazards at the sub-kilometre scale from both weather- and explosive volcano-induced events, (3) reproducibility of meteotsunami hazard by climate models, for their eventual assessment in the future climate, (4) eventual optimization and improvement of the meteotsunami monitoring, and (5) developing stochastic techniques for meteotsunami uncertainty quantification. To achieve these objectives, state-of-the-art tools will be used, like (1) global quality-checked high-frequency sea level analyses, (2) coupled atmosphere-ocean global and (sub-)kilometre models, (3) climate simulations, reanalyses and products, and (4) uncertainty quantification techniques and optimal experimental design methods. The project gathers both Croatian and international experts that are at the forefront in the research and applications of the proposed methods. The project at its implementation will provide hazard assessment of all of the quoted processes, that is currently not existing, as being based mostly on reproduction of single meteotsunami events.