SoylentNews

hubie [soylentnews.org] writes:

A tsunami is a wave, or series of waves, associated with a single event disturbance; something pushes on the water in a specific location causing a wave to propagate outward. The most infamous tsunamis [caltech.edu] were caused by large seismic events, such as earthquakes, volcanoes [geonet.org.nz], or underwater landslides [usc.edu].

There is a lesser-known class of tsunami, outside of coastal regions at least, that is caused by meteorological conditions and is called a meteotsunami [weather.gov]. This is caused by an atmospheric disturbance, typically associated with a combination of a rapid atmospheric pressure change and strong winds, such as one would get with a strong convective storm front. Not every storm generates them because the conditions need to be optimized, such as having the speed of the atmospheric disturbance match the local shallow wave speed in the water. Meteotsunamis are very common in oceans around the world and have generated surges as high as 6 meters, though these large destructive events are very rare.

Meteotsunamis also occur in lakes, but they largely go unrecognized because they are mostly very small events, or they get confused with seiches [noaa.gov], which is when water sloshes back-and-forth in an enclosed region much like water in a bathtub. A pair of University of Wisconsin researchers looked back at 20 years of historical tide and atmospheric weather data and they determined that the Great Lakes [noaa.gov] are subject to frequent meteotsunamis [duluthnewstribune.com], and that they, not seiches, are the most likely cause of some of the worst beach disasters [msu.edu] seen on the lakes. Their paper [wiley.com] presents meteotsunami statistics and their associated causative storms to develop a predictive tool in the hopes of developing a warning system for the Great Lakes.

Original Submission