The Adriatic Sea and Coast modelling suite: Evaluation of the meteotsunami forecast component

The paper presents the Adriatic Sea and Coast (AdriSC) Meteotsunami Forecast system, which has been developed to operationally forecast meteotsunamis - atmospherically-generated destructive ocean waves in the tsunami frequency band, in the Adriatic Sea. The challenges posed by modelling meteotsunamis are first reviewed, then the AdriSC Meteotsunami Forecast system set-up is presented in detail and finally the atmosphere and ocean model results are evaluated against 48 air pressure sensors and 19 tide gauges for six different meteotsunami events. The statistical analysis of the high-frequency model results reveals that the AdriSC atmospheric and ocean models can reproduce meteotsunami events, even though their performances highly vary depending on the event and observation location. A qualitative analysis of the maps of extreme sea level and mean sea level pressure high-frequency model results shows that even a slight shift in location (of the order of 1 to 10 km) of the atmospheric disturbances, responsible for the meteotsunami generation, results in the incapability of the ocean models to reproduce the observed floods occurring during the meteotsunami events. This study presents the first available thorough evaluation of a deterministic meteotsunami forecast system. As such, it establishes that a carefully envisioned modelling system, even if imperfect, can be implemented to reproduce and forecast meteotsunami events.