Possible atmospheric origin of the 7 May 2007 western Black Sea shelf tsunami event

The paper examines the possibility that tsunami event recorded in the western Black Sea on 7 May 2007 was triggered by a traveling atmospheric disturbance. As meteotsunamis are favored by specific synoptic conditions, we inspected available ground and sounding observations, European Centre for Medium‐Range Weather Forecasts reanalysis fields, and satellite‐based products and compared them to the documented Mediterranean meteotsunamis. We found an atmospheric disturbance traveling toward 30° (NNE) with amplitude of 2–3 hPa and propagation speed of about 16 m/s, passing through few tens of kilometers wide pathway over the region affected by the tsunami. This disturbance occurred in the lower troposphere, but it was capped by instable convective cell that preserved gravity disturbance's coherence over a region at least 150 km long. An ocean modeling study showed that such a disturbance is capable of generating large tsunami waves and strong currents over the shallow regions, following the observations over the region where maximum sea level oscillations have been documented. Therefore, this event has a potential to be classified as a meteotsunami, the first of such kind in the Black Sea.