The Hunga Tonga‐Hunga Ha'apai Hydration of the Stratosphere

Abstract

not only injected ash into the stratosphere but also large amounts of water vapor, breaking all records for direct injection of water vapor, by a volcano or otherwise, in the satellite era. This is not surprising since the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai caldera was formerly situated 150 m below sea level. The massive blast injected water vapor up to altitudes as high as 53 km. Using measurements from the Microwave Limb Sounder on NASA's Aura satellite, we estimate that the excess water vapor is equivalent to around 10% of the amount of water vapor typically residing in the stratosphere. Unlike previous strong eruptions, this event may not cool the surface, but rather it could potentially warm the surface due to the excess water vapor. MILLÁN ET AL.

Perturbations in stratospheric aerosol evolution due to the water-rich plume of the 2022 Hunga-Tonga eruption

“…It is not unreasonable to inject in a larger area. MLS observations on Jan 16 (a day after the eruption) show the latitudinal spreading of water vapor anomaly is more than 10 degrees 5 . The simulated plume does not spread as fast as observed because it is hard for the global model to reproduce the vertical wind shear as observed due to the limited spatial resolution, especially for a tropical volcanic plume spreading in the first couple of days 21 .…”

“…To be consistent with the MLS water anomalies 5 , we need to inject ~150 Tg of water in an area of ~6 × 10 5 km 2 , which is about three times larger than the anvil size observed by NOAA's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite 17 on January 15, 2022. This large area is needed because the residual amount of water is determined by the ice vapor pressure curve as shown in Supplementary Fig.…”

“…1a). MLS also sees a small amount of water between 10 to 1 hPa in those days 5 . We inject 0.42 Tg of SO 2 and 150 Tg of H 2 O from 4 UTC to 10 UTC on January 15, 2022 (ignoring the small eruption that occurred on January 13, 2022.…”

“…Observations from several satellites showed enhanced levels of stratospheric sulfur dioxide (SO 2 ) (by the TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument, TRO-POMI and the Ozone Mapping and Profiling Suite Nadir-Mapper, OMPS-NM), water vapor (by the Microwave Limb Sounder, MLS), aerosols (by OMPS Limb Profiler, OMPS LP and Cloud-Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization, CALIOP), and possibly ice (by CALIOP) as we will discuss in this work. Unlike some land-based volcanos, HTHH injected more than 100 Tg of water into the stratosphere 4,5 , which normally contains about 1500 Tg of water globally defined for a tropopause pressure of 100 hPa. The MLS onboard NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS) Aura satellite 6 observed enhanced water vapor that persisted for more than 3 months.…”

Stratospheric Balloon Observations of Infrasound Waves From the 15 January 2022 Hunga Eruption, Tonga

“…The altitude of volcanic overshoots, the height and extent of the umbrella cloud set a new record for volcanic eruptions over the satellite era, overtaking Mount Pinatubo and its maximum reported plume height of 40 km (Holasek et al, 1996). The plume generated a large perturbation of the stratospheric aerosol layer and stratospheric composition (Millán et al, 2022), with likely substantial radiative impacts (Sellitto et al, 2022).Besides triggering globally detected surface seismic waves (…”