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“This eruption put us in uncharted territory,” said Ross Salawitch, professor at the University of Maryland’s Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center and co-author of the study. “We’ve never seen, in the history of satellite records, this much water vapor injected into the atmosphere and our paper is the first that looks at the downstream consequences over broad regions of both hemispheres in the months following the eruption using satellite data and a global model.”
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We surmise that breaching of the magma chamber occurred at depth at 0402±1UTC, after which a bubbly, gas-laden and fragmenting magma made its way towards the surface. The exponential increase in eruption intensity at 0408 UTC could reflect the transition from surtseyan to subplinian activity, with the change to phreatoplinian activity marked by intense explosions beginning at 0414 ± 2 UTC and peaking at 0429 ± 2 UTC—the likely source of the incredibly large Lamb waves, tsunami, ground-coupled airwaves, meteo-tsunami, and colossal amounts of volcanic lightning.
Based on these first-order observations, peak volumetric discharge and mass flow rates of the volcanic plume are ∼9 × 105 m3/s and 1.3 × 109 kg/s, respectively, given a mean column density of 1500 kg/m3 typical of phreatoplinian volcanic columns (e.g., Sparks et al., 1997). Integration of the plume height time series reconstructed from imagery gives a preliminary total eruptive volume of 1.9 km3, corresponding to an eruptive mass of ∼2 850 Tg. Explosive activity was aided by the relatively high concentration (∼5 wt.% H2O) of juvenile (magmatic) H2O dissolved in the pre-eruptive melt, assuming that pre-eruptive wt.% H2O is consistent with eruptive products from 2009 to 2014–2015 (Colombier et al., 2018; Brenna et al., 2022), which is a reasonable preliminary approximation. A high magmatic volatile content presumably increased the depth in the volcanic conduit at which magma fragmentation occurred, supercharging the later and shallower exchange of heat between already-fragmented magma and seawater, and affording the rapid flashing to steam with attendant enormous increase in volume. The conversion of pressure-volume work associated with the expansion to kinetic energy and vertically-directed momentum coupled to enhanced plume buoyancy enabled the vigorous plume to develop with associated atmospheric shock waves. As a crude estimate, if the mass fraction of seawater constituted 15% of the eruptive product, then the flashing of seawater from liquid to steam contributes ∼2 300 km3 of volume expansion (Haar et al., 1984) when heated to magmatic temperatures. Indeed, a unique aspect of the HTHH eruption was the ingress of seawater (external, not magmatic water) and its phase change to a supercritical fluid. The PV work done pushing the atmosphere away from the eruptive vent constitutes an approximate mechanical energy of ∼2 × 1017 J, which is in relatively good agreement with preliminary blast energies associated with atmospheric shock waves of 4–18 MT...
level-headed people are just tired of trying...
The 2022 Hunga eruption injected an unprecedented amount of water vapor directly into the very dry stratosphere. This abrupt increase in water vapor from Hunga occurred at a time when the stratosphere was already gradually becoming moister. Using measurements from the Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) on NASA's Aura satellite, we show that stratospheric water vapor remained elevated, essentially unchanged, from the time of the eruption until at least early 2024. MLS data further reveal that, in 2023, one of the main mechanisms for drying the stratosphere—permanent removal of water vapor by formation and settling of ice polar stratospheric cloud particles over Antarctica—was substantially more effective than usual, boosted by the excess water vapor from Hunga. Projections indicate that the return to moisture levels that would have been expected in the absence of the eruption depends on how humid the stratosphere continues to get. Considering the ongoing moistening trend and the water vapor injected by Hunga, the stratosphere could remain unusually humid for a considerable period.
...The MLS observations show that within 5 months of the eruption, the hydrated plumes have spread in both directions from 65° S to 35° N but mostly within the bulk plume layer (20–30 km)...
This got me thinking... if the water vapor content in the atmosphere rose in 2023 after the Tonga eruption of January 15th, 2022... 2023 ended up being a very significant year in the tropics.