Silent Threat: Predicting Acoustic Meteotsunami Global Hazards

After the explosive eruption of the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha’apai volcano in January 2022, the generation of tsunamis driven by atmospheric acoustic-gravity waves, including the Lamb waves, has been intensively studied by the geoscientific community, resulting in hundreds of published articles since the eruption. These rare events, stemming from catastrophic volcanic eruptions, have the potential to generate surges reaching 1 to 10 m along more than 7% of the world’s coastlines. Despite their global hazard potential, probabilistic models that effectively capture the uncertainty of these events remain underdeveloped. Here, we lay the foundations of a new multidisciplinary field of research dedicated to the study of these acoustic meteotsunami events. Our work includes implementing stochastic meteotsunami surge models for 7 different volcanoes and for each of the most populated and/or endangered coastal cities in the world. We derive planetary meteotsunami surge hazards using a surrogate model approach which has already proven effective in providing fast and reliable forecasts in geosciences. As volcanic eruptions occur at the geological scale, we build these models through the numerical reproduction of all potential events with thousands of high-fidelity simulations accounting for three main sources of uncertainty: amplitude, wavelength and dissipation of the Lamb waves. Following this approach, our aim is twofold: first, to advance understanding of ocean dynamics during acoustically-driven events through in-depth analyses of the numerical simulations; and second, to enhance global coastal safety by integrating the surrogate models within existing early warning systems and providing actionable surge forecasts in the aftermath of volcanic eruptions.