Numerical Simulations of a Meteotsunami using both Atmospheric and Phase-resolving Wave Models in the Yellow Sea

During the past decades, meteotsunamis have occurred all over the world oceans and their destructive long waves have threatened the local community near the coastal areas. Among them, meteorological tsunamis occurred in the Yellow Sea have brought unexpected casualties and property damage to the local community on the western coast of the Korean Peninsula in 2007 and 2008. The events have attracted the attention of many engineers and scientists because abrupt extreme waves have attacked several coasts and ports even under fine weather conditions. There have been many researches to identify underlying processes of meteotsunamis and our understanding has substantially improved. Nevertheless, many open issues still remain unresolved. Although it is well known that Proudman resonance plays a dominant role in meteotsunami-related atmosphere-ocean energy transfer, detailed amplification processes of meteotsunamis influenced by the local bathymetry have not been sufficiently identified yet. In this study, numerical experiments were conducted to identify the generation and amplification mechanisms of the meteotsunami occurred in the Yellow Sea. In general, a small-scale meteotsunami, like the events occurred in the Yellow Sea, should be analyzed using a high-resolution modeling system because water motions can be affected by local terrain. To achieve the objective, high-resolution atmospheric modelling was conducted to reproduce the atmospheric pressure disturbances observed in the Yellow Sea and, then the generation and propagation of the meteotsunami over real topographies was simulated using a phase-resolving wave model. Both an atmospheric model, Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF), and a shoallow water equations model, COMCOT, were employed to simulate the generation and transformation of the meteotsunami, respectively. The numerical results were first compared with the available observational data during the event to validate the modelling system, and then used to identify the generation and amplification mechanism of the meteotsunami in the Yellow Sea.