July 1, 2015 Tsunami: North Sea, Scotland

On the evening of 1 July 2015 the sea-level along parts of the east coast of Scotland was reported to have lowered, and then returned sharply. The size of water level change observed in the entrance to Stonehaven harbour was 1.25m. The following account comes from an email report passed on by Harbourmaster James Brown from Aberdeenshire Council. The harbour at Stonehaven: ...experienced a tidal surge at the harbour last night at 19.30, when the water suddenly started to rush out for about 5 minutes dropping about 1.25 mtrs, then after a couple of minutes returned with some force. Several small vessels were affected by the unexpected changes in tidal flow as water first flowed out of the harbour then returned. Two 40ft vessels had their rails damaged and stanchion posts pulled out of place as the tide changed. On the Sovereign the foremast was ripped out of its socket by a mooring rope causing a serious head injury to a crewman. Initial investigations found evidence that a number of tide gauges around Scotland had reported unusual tidal movements. Similar tidal movements were reported by human observers in Gourdon harbour. The tide gauge at Aberdeen showed possible seiche activity from 1800 UTC on 1 July, with the residual levels varying between about plus 20cm and minus 15cm around the mean, based upon 15min data... It is evident then that pressure anomalies were observed near or ahead of the travelling convective cells, thus showing that it is likely that there was a convectively generated surface pressure wave travelling northwards. The speed of movement was approximately 46kn and correlated with the time that sea-level changes were reported along the coast. This supports the belief that meteorological factors were responsible for generating and maintaining a tsunami-like wave in the North Sea. (reference #11466)

North Sea 2015. On the 1 July 2015, waves impacted the east coast of Scotland after a 1.25m drop in the sea level at Stonehaven Harbour. The conclusions of Sibley et al. (2016) were that the event was a meteotsunami caused by the associated convective systems and surface pressure anomalies. (reference #6325)