The great Adriatic flood of 21 June 1978 thirty years later: An overview of the existing reports

The paper describes an extraordinary tsunami-like event occurred on 21 June 1978 and encompassing the middle and south Adriatic Sea. The flood had its culmination in Vela Luka, where the maximum wave height of 6 m was reported. The paper contains detailed description of the event as seen by eyewitnesses, its outreach along both eastern and western coasts, and aftermath recovery activities in Vela Luka. All available instrumental records have been collected and analysed to detect the source and the generating mechanism of the long ocean waves. Seismic generation is fully excluded from the considerations, while the submarine landslide seems rather unrealistic as not explaining the characteristics of the measured ocean waves. Therefore, the source of the event was presumably in the atmosphere, where a travelling disturbance has been detected, capable to resonantly transfer the energy to the ocean via the Proudman resonance mechanism. Although the data prove the proposed mechanism, the final confirmation for such a scenario should come from process-oriented numerical modelling study.