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Abstract:
On January 15, 2022, the Hunga-Tonga Hunga-Ha’apai volcano generated unexpectedly strong tsunami that was recorded all over the Pacific Ocean and in other ocean basins, including the Caribbean and Mediterranean seas. Mounting evidence quickly pointed toward an unorthodox tsunami generation mechanism – forcing by propagating pressure anomalies from acoustic gravity waves (a.k.a atmospheric Lamb waves) originated from the volcanic blast.The Lamb wave forcing of tsunami is similar to the formation of meteotsunamis from weather systems and to the gravity waves formation from other large atmospheric explosions like meteorite impacts, including the role of Proudman resonance to amplify the wave in certain directions. Those generation mechanisms have been studied before; however, the January 15, 2022 Tonga tsunami is the first event that proved the existence of air-pressure coupling mechanism for tsunami generation during the blast events. It also provided ample data for the model verification and testing for pressure-generated tsunamis. As the result, the ongoing modeling efforts to simulate the 2022 Tonga tsunami plays an important role in quantifying the hazard and possible mitigation measures for tsunamis generated by moving pressure disturbance.Tsunami models simulating moving pressure generation mechanisms for volcanos, meteotsunamis, asteroid impacts are presented. Commonalities, differences and effectiveness of these sources for tsunami generation are considered. Potential hazard mitigation measures are discussed.
