1. Towards understanding and operational early warning of the Adriatic meteotsunamis: Project MESSI
Jadranka Šepić1, Ivica Vilibić1, Clea Denamiel1, Hrvoje Mihanović1, Stipe Muslim1, Martina Tudor2, Damir Ivanković1, Dalibor Jelavić1, Vedrana Kovačević3, Toni Mašće1, Vlado Dadić1, Miro Gačić3, Kristian Horvath2, Sebastian Monserrat4, Alexander Rabinovich5,6, Maja Telišman-Prtenjak7
1 Institute of Oceanography and Fisheries, Split, Croatia
2 Meteorological and Hydrological Service, Zagreb, Croatia
3 Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale (OGS), Sgonico, Italy
4 Department of Physics, University of the Balearic Islands, Palma de Mallorca, Spain
5 P.P. Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia
6 Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Institute of Ocean Sciences, Sidney BC, Canada
7 Faculty of Science, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
About meteotsunamis
World hotspots
Connection to synoptics
MeEWS architecture
Concluding remarks

2. Project Title: Meteotsunamis, destructive long ocean waves in the tsunami frequency band: from observations and simulations towards a warning system (MESSI)
Principal Investigator: Jadranka Šepić
Co-Principal Investigator: Miro Gačić
Funding: Unity Through Knowledge Fund
Budget: ,11 HRK ( ,11 HRK - UKF)
Project Duration: 15 December 2015 – 14 December 2017
Involved Institution: Institute of Oceanography and Fisheries, (Split, Croatia); Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale (Trieste, Italy); Meteorological and Hydrological Service (Zagreb, Croatia); University of the Balearic Islands (Palma de Mallorca, Spain); International Tsunami Research, Inc. (Victoria, BC, Canada)

3. About meteotsunamis
Well, I don’t know how many of you heard about meteotsunamis, destructive long ocean waves in the tsunami frequency band
Ciutadella, Balearic Islands, 15 June 2006
Vela Luka, Adriatic Sea, 21 June 1978
Variance and range of nonseismic high-frequency sea level oscillations
(Vilibic and Sepic, Sci Rep, 2017)
Sea level range over
frequencies at Fremantle, Australia (courtesy of C. Pattiaratchi)

4. About meteotsunamis
Meteorological tsunamis are long oceanic waves that have approximately the same spatial and temporal scales as ordinary tsunamis, and can affect coastal regions in a similar destructive way, but are generated not by underwater earthquakes, volcanic explosions or landslides, but by atmospheric disturbances (hurricanes, frontal passages, squall lines, internal atmospheric waves or by jumps of atmospheric pressure).
Munk [1962]: ‘…The most conspicuous thing about long waves in the open ocean is their absence’
Tsunami and meteotsunami records
(Monserrat et al., NHESS, 2006)
Meteotsunamigenic air pressure disturbances
Sea level record in Split during the 1978 Vela Luka meteotsunami
Tsunami and meteotsunami spectra

5. About meteotsunamis
The story of meteotsunami dynamics in a single graph
Šepić et al., Sci Rep, 2015

6. World hotspots
The science of meteotsunamis evolved during the last decades

7. World hotspots Derecho of 29-30 June 2012
Derecho of 29 June 2012 produced all-time highest June or July wind gusts. Five million people lost power and 22 were killed.
The derecho of June 2012 traveled approximately 700 miles in twelve hours, inflicting untold damage and hardship along a heavily populated corridor through the Midwest and Mid Atlantic states.

8. World hotspots
Meteotsunami in the Great Lakes and on the Atlantic coast of the USA generated by derecho of June 2012
Šepić and Rabinovich, Nat Hazards, 2014

9. World hotspots Ciutadella, Spain, 15 June 2006
5-m waves at the top of the bay, strong currents
Tens of sunk and damaged yachts, loss of ~30 MEuro.
Monserrat et al., NHESS, 2006

10. World hotspots 27 June 2014: 2-m wave injured 12 people in Odessa
Due to Ukrainian situation, extraordinary explanations flooded the media

11. World hotspots
Yet, it was one of the Mediterranean and Black Sea multi-meteotsunamis of June 2014
27/06/2014
25-26/06/2014
25/06/2014
22-23/06/2014
Ciutadella

12. World hotspots
Exceptional events may occur over thousand of kilometres
A series of destructive meteotsunamis hit the Mediterranean and Black Sea, following a peculiar atmospheric setting at synoptic scale
Šepić et al., Sci. Rep., 2015

13. Wave heights were up to 6 m, typical period was about 20 min!
World hotspots
Meteotsunami („šćiga”) in Vela Luka, Croatia, on 21 June 1978
Wave heights were up to 6 m, typical period was about 20 min!

14. World hotspots Panama City, FL Panama City Beach, FL Rovinj, Croatia
Meteotsunami in Gulf od Mexico, 28 March 2014
Panama City, FL
28 March 2014
29 March 2014
Panama City Beach, FL
Wave height ~1.4 m
Period ~10 min
Meteotsunami in Brazil Praya-do-Casino, Brazil, 9 February 2014
Rovinj, Croatia

15. Connection to synoptics
The Mediterranean event of June 2014 was connected to a propagating upper troposphere atmospheric storm, which were favourable for generation of ducted intense air pressure oscillations
Šepić et al., Sci. Rep., 2015

16. Connection to synoptics
Šepić et al., PO, 2015
Vilibić and Šepić, Sci Rep, 2017
In general, high-frequency sea level oscillations in the Mediterranean and most of the World (not only meteotsunamis) may be attributed to synoptic patterns

17. Connection to synoptics
*** GRL paper ***

18. MeEWS architecture
General concept of a meteotsunami warning system (Vilibić et al., Front Mar Sci, 2016)

19. MeEWS architecture
Three modules of the Adriatic meteotsunami early warning system (MeEWS):
(1) synoptic warning module
(2) probabilistic premodelling module
(3) real-time monitoring module
Wish her to be operational in early 2018!
*** a flow diagram here ***

20. MeEWS architecture Synoptic warning module – 7 days warning in advance
Based on computation of the synoptic meteotsunami index for the middle Adriatic – still need longer 1-min sea level measurements at hot spots for doing proper statistics

21. MeEWS architecture
Probabilistic premodelling module – 2 days warning in advance
The modelling strategy is twofold: (1) the deterministic generation of meteotsunamis offshore is obtain with an operational atmosphere-ocean model of the Adriatic Sea at 1km spatial resolution based on the state-of-the-art fully coupled COAWST model, while (2) the coastal risk (maximum elevation and currents) is statistically given via the application of the Pseudo Spectral Approximation (PSA) method with the pressure field and the manning’s coefficient defined as a stochastic processes used to force the 6,401 high-resolution ADCIRC simulations
Details in the poster P14 by Clea Denamiel!

22. MESSI observational network
MeEWS architecture
Real-time monitoring module – an hour warning in advance
Detection of meteotsunamigenic air pressure disturbances – intensity, speed and propagation direction
Then, the best simulation is chosen to estimate the hazard
Split
Brač
Stari Grad
Vis
Svetac
Vela Luka
Sobra
Ortona
Palagruža
Tremiti
Vieste
Ocean-atmospheric
Atmospheric
BPR
MESSI observational network

23. Conclusions and perspectives
MESSI project major achievements:
Better knowledge on meteotsunami source and propagation, in the Adriatic and worldwide
A step in observational Adriatic network
Design of the multi-level meteotsunami early warning system
Innovative methodology introduced in geosciences for probabilistic hazard estimates ( PSA method)
Future steps:
Towards operability of the proposed MeEWS
Towards validation of the system