The Great Lakes, along with the Mediterranean, Japan and many other parts of the world, have a long history of such waves, which have characteristics similar to tsunamis triggered by earthquakes or landslides. Only recently, however, have scientists unraveled how a storm can create and propagate these far-traveling waves — called meteorological tsunamis or meteotsunamis. The waves, which arise out of a complex interplay of storm speed, wave dynamics and ocean-bottom bathymetry, may be less common than seismic tsunamis, but they can still be destructive and deadly.

It has often been said that individual weather events cannot be attributed to global climate change, but recent advances in the science of attribution are challenging that notion. A recent report from 18 different research teams that analyzed 12 extreme weather events in 2012 suggests that climate change was a contributing factor in about half of them.

The U.S. Geological Survey's website states it in no uncertain terms: There is no such thing as "earthquake weather." Yet, from at least the time of Aristotle, some people have professed links between atmospheric conditions and seismic shaking. For the most part, these hypotheses have not held up under scientific scrutiny and earthquake researchers have set them aside as intriguing but unfounded ideas. However, in the last decade new efforts to identify effects of weather-related, or in some cases climate-related, processes on seismicity have drawn new interest.