Destructive Potential of Planetary Meteotsunami Waves beyond the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha‘apai Volcano Eruption

Abstract

Worldwide tsunamis driven by atmospheric waves—or planetary meteotsunami waves—are extremely rare events. They mostly occur during supervolcano explosions or asteroid impacts capable to generate atmospheric acoustic-gravity waves including the Lamb waves that can circle the globe multiple times. Recently, such ocean waves have been globally recorded after the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha‘apai volcano eruption on 15 January 2022, but did not pose any serious danger to the coastal communities. However, this study highlights that the mostly ignored destructive potential of planetary meteotsunami waves can be compared to the well-studied tsunami hazards. In practice, several process-oriented numerical experiments are designed to force a global ocean model with the realistic atmospheric response to the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha‘apai event rescaled in speed and amplitude. These simulations demonstrate that the meteotsunami surges can be higher than 1 m (and up to 10 m) along more than 7% of the world coastlines. Planetary meteotsunami waves thus have the potential to cause serious coastal damages and even human casualties during volcanic explosions or asteroid impacts either releasing intense acoustic energy or producing internal atmospheric gravity waves triggering the deep-ocean Proudman resonance at a speed of ∼212 m s ⁻¹. Based on records of catastrophic events in Earth’s history, both scenarios are found to be realistic, and consequently, the global meteotsunami hazards should now be properly assessed to prepare for the next big volcanic eruption or asteroid impact even occurring inland.