Abstract
Atmospheric pressure and sea level records recorded in tidal observatories along the Pacific Coast of Mexico and in the Deep-Ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunami (DART Station 43412) SW of Manzanillo are used to investigate the mechanism of this complex tsunami that produced wave heights in bays and harbors as high as the wave heights produced by large far-field tsunamis. The term complex tsunami is coined here as a tsunami composed of sea surface reverberation—produced by the footprint of the atmospheric shock wave during its propagation through the oceans—and of the tsunami—produced by the atmospheric pressure footprint around the Hunga-Tonga volcano, and by the submarine part of the volcano explosion—both coupled trough harbor resonance. An amplitude damping function for the atmospheric shock wave is investigated here to improve tsunami warnings due to volcanic eruptions, in the sense that complex tsunamis may produce significant harbor resonance in well-known tsunami responsive harbors. The atmospheric pressure footprint during the volcanic eruption around the Hunga-Tonga volcano is estimated here of 40 millibars (mb), through the inverse damping function.
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Acknowledgements
L.G. Ortiz-Huerta acknowledges support from CONACyT (Mexico) through the postdoctoral program scholarship. DART sea level data are courtesy of the National Data Buoy Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Sea level data along the Pacific Coast of Mexico were kindly provided by the Joint Sea Level Network Operations of Mexico, operated by CICESE, SEMAR. We gratefully acknowledge the anonymous reviewers for their sound review and constructive comments that enhanced the contents of the manuscript.
Funding
This article was funded by CONACyT (Grant no. 221676, Laura G. Ortiz-Huerta).
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Ortiz-Huerta, L.G., Ortiz, M. On the Hunga-Tonga Complex Tsunami as Observed Along the Pacific Coast of Mexico on January 15, 2022. Pure Appl. Geophys. 179, 1139–1145 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00024-022-03027-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00024-022-03027-7