Simultaneous meteorological tsunamis and storm surges at Buenos Aires coast, southeastern South America
Dragani, W.C.; D'Onofrio, E.E.; Oreiro, F.; Alonso, G.; Fiore, M.; Grismeyer, W. (2015). Simultaneous meteorological tsunamis and storm surges at Buenos Aires coast, southeastern South America, in: Vilibic, I. et al. Meteorological tsunamis: The U.S. East Coast and other coastal regions. pp. 269-280. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12712-5_15 In: Vilibic, I.; Montserrat, S.; Rabinovich, A.B. (Ed.) (2015). Meteorological tsunamis: The U.S. East Coast and other coastal regions. Previously published in Natural Hazards, Volume 74, Issue 1, 2014. Springer: Cham. ISBN 978-3-319-12711-8. 303 pp. https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12712-5, more |
| Keyword | | | Author keywords | Meteorological tsunamis Storm surges Meteorological cold front passages Coastal erosion Buenos Aires Province coast |
| Authors | | Top | - Dragani, W.C.
- D'Onofrio, E.E.
- Oreiro, F.
| - Alonso, G.
- Fiore, M.
- Grismeyer, W.
| |
| Abstract | Meteorological tsunamis are frequently observed in different tide stations at the southeastern coast of South America. They are associated with the occurrence of atmospheric gravity waves during the passages of cold fronts over the Buenos Aires Province continental shelf. On the other hand, storm surges are also frequent in the region, and they are associated with strong and persistent southerlies, which are also frequent during cold front passages. The impact of meteorological tsunamis in coastal erosion and in the statistics of storm surge trends is discussed in this paper. For this study, fifteen meteorological tsunamis (with maximum wave heights higher than 0.20 m), seven of them simultaneous to the occurrence of storm surge events (with extreme levels higher than |±0.60 m|), are selected from April 2010 to January 2013. The impact of meteorological tsunamis in the storm erosion potential index (SEPI) is evaluated. Not significant differences are obtained between SEPI calculated with and without filtering the meteorological tsunami signal from the storm surge data series. Moreover, several experiments are carried out computing SEPI from synthetic sea level data series, but very low changes (lower than 4 %) are also obtained. It is concluded that the presence of moderate meteorological tsunamis on sea level records would not enhance this index at the Buenos Aires Province coast. On the other hand, taking into account that meteorological tsunamis can reach up the 20–30 % of the storm surge height, it was concluded that the statistics of storm surge trends (and their uncertainties) should be revised for Mar del Plata data series. |
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