On June 13, 2013, a rare meteotsunami struck my hometown in Massachusetts, causing significant damage to some of the nearby harbors. Meteotsunamis form along squall lines and derechos, when the speed of an atmospheric pressure or wind disturbance is comparable to the phase speed of long waves in the ocean. Meteotsunami waves are small (rarely larger than a foot), but they can cause a lot of damage to coastlines.
For this project, I compiled a small database of 223 squall line and hurricane events that struck the US East Coast between 2000 and 2013. Following a detailed analysis of the data, our team wrote a paper on our findings. Despite the lengthy federal government shutdown in October 2013, we still published the article three months ahead of schedule in the Natural Hazards journal.