Climate projections of meteotsunami hazards

Abstract

Global climate models, indispensable for projecting the human-driven climate change, have been improving for decades and are nowadays capable of reproducing multiple processes (e.g., aerosols, sea-ice, carbon cycle) at up to 25 km horizontal resolution. Meteotsunami events – tsunami waves generated by mesoscale atmospheric processes – are properly captured only by sub-kilometre-scale downscaling of these models. However, the computational cost of long-term high-resolution climate simulations providing accurate meteotsunami hazard assessments would be prohibitive. In this article, to overcome this deficiency, we present a new methodology allowing to project sub-kilometre-scale meteotsunami hazards and their climate uncertainties at any location in the world. Practically, the methodology uses (1) synoptic indices to preselect a substantial number of short-term meteotsunami episodes and (2) a suite of atmospheric and oceanic models to downscale them from an ensemble of global models to the sub-kilometre-scale. Such approach, using hundreds of events to build robust statistics, could allow for an objective assessment of the meteotsunami hazards at the climate scale which, on top of sea level rise and storm surge hazards, is crucial for building adaptation plans to protect coastal communities worldwide.