# A Database for Tsunamis and Meteotsunamis in the Adriatic Sea
## 4 Discussion
In particular, after the devastating 1667 Dubrovnik earthquake, anomalous movements were observed in the waters of the canals of Venice, while the tsunami generated by the 1979 Montenegro earthquake was recorded by the tide gauge of Bari in Apulia. Modeling studies of tsunami propagation from different source areas and tsunami hazards in the Adriatic Sea have shown that earthquakes in the northern Adiatic Sea are not very efficient in generating tsunamis due to the shallow water depth, while the central Adriatic Sea has low seismicity and shallow water, and tsunami waves arriving from the southern Adriatic Sea are partly reflected by the Palagruza rocks [6; 34]. Furthermore, the Croatian island chain protects both coasts from tsunami waves propagating from the opposite side of the Adriatic. According to [20], earthquakes located in front of the Montenegrin coast are more efficient at generating tsunamis, and the seismically active region in front of the Albanian coast can generate severe tsunamis, but the modeling results are contradictory as to whether or not tsunamis generated in this area can propagate toward the Italian coasts [6; 34]. At the moment, the evidence of the recording of sea level variation during the 1979 Montenegro earthquake in the tide gauge of Bari suggests a possible propagation from the eastern to the western coasts [34]. However, further studies are recommended. Concerning meteotsunamis, DAMT reports 33 events that occurred from 1931 to the present date, with 103 observations related to 58 places. Compared with tsunamis, for meteotsunamis, the time interval covered by DAMT is much shorter, since the first meteotsunami included occurred in 1931. This is essentily due to two factors: (1) as highlighted in [3], for previous events, usually only the year of occurrence was known, and therefore, they were not verifiable or reliable, and (2) meteotsunamis as a phenomenon are a recent discovery. Just think that the first description of tsunami-like effects produced by atmospheric disturbances appeared only in 1931 [27], and the term \"meteotsunami\" was introduced only in 1961 [27]. As also highlighted in [31], for the characterization and proper definition of a meteotsunami event, long-term, high-frequency measurements are necessary. Unfortunately, as mentioned above, historical observations of meteotsunamis in the Adriatic region were extremely scarce and poorly detailed until the early 1930s. In addition, only in recent decades have instruments capable of analyzing such phenomena been installed. Gathering the information and cataloguing these events is crucial to identify \"hot-spots\", which intensify observational networks in order to obtain, in the future, a robust dataset number to characterize these events, both in terms of effects produced and generated characteristics. Although the number of events present in DAMT does not allow for performing statistical analysis, it enables us to make general observations. The exam of the meteotsunami events included in DAMT shows that all of them originated from the Croatian coasts, mainly in the central part of the region. Unlike the tsunamis, the effects of three of them--the 19 September 1977, 21 June 1978 and 25 June 2014 events--were also clearly observed along the Italian coasts. The latter, the strongest meteotsunami in the Mediterranean that was destructive in Vela Luka, affected 14 locations along the Italian coast from Ancona to Otranto, causing serious damage in some places and some injuries in Vieste. For the classification of meteotsunamis, in the DAMT, we used the criterion proposed by the authors of [3], who assigned a QIndex to each event based on how detailed the bibliographic sources were according to different parameters. In addition, considering the description of meteotsunami effects as if they were tsunami descriptions, in the DAMT, a local intensity value was also assigned for each observation point (OP) according to both Ambraseys-Sieberg [32] and Papadopoulos-Imamura [33] scales.