The January 2022 eruption of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano reached the mesosphere

Abstract

Explosive volcanic eruptions can loft ash, gases, and water into the stratosphere, which affects both human activities and the climate. Using geostationary satellite images of the 15 January 2022 eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano, we find that the volcanic plume produced by this volcano reached an altitude of 57 kilometers at its highest extent. This places the plume in the lower mesosphere and provides observational evidence of a volcanic eruption injecting material through the stratosphere and directly into the mesosphere. We then discuss potential implications of this injection and suggest that the altitude reached by plumes from previous eruptions, such as the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991, may have been underestimated because of a lack of observational data.

The 2022 Hunga-Tonga megatsunami: Near-field simulation of a once-in-a-century event

“…By all accounts, the phreatoplinian HTHH eruption of 15 January 2022 involved a series of eruptive and explosive events that spanned hours ( 7 , 36 ). Eruptive events typically persist for several minutes, during which eruptive products are actively expelled from vents and great volcanic plumes are cast into the stratosphere ( 37 , 38 ). Explosive events, by contrast, constitute a large explosion of steam generated by phreatomagmatic interactions [i.e., molten fuel coolant interactions (MFCI)].…”

Atmospheric and Ionospheric Responses to Hunga‐Tonga Volcano Eruption Simulated by WACCM‐X

“…The eruption of Hunga Tonga‐Hunga Ha'apai volcano (hereafter Hunga eruption) on 15 January 2022 was one of the largest ever recorded, comparable in size to the 1883 Krakatau eruption (Matoza et al., 2022). The volcanic cloud reached over 30 km, and the transient overshoot up to the mesosphere (Proud et al., 2022). Surface pressure perturbations were registered by barometers around the globe with magnitudes over 1 hPa (Amores et al., 2022; Matoza et al., 2022).…”

Tongan Volcanic Eruption Induced Global‐Scale Thermospheric Changes Observed by the GOLD Mission

“…The eruption also released an enormous amount of energy (∼10–20 EJ estimated by Wright et al., 2022) into the atmosphere. In addition to the lower atmosphere, the eruption's signature was also detected in the mesosphere (Proud et al., 2022) and the Thermosphere‐Ionosphere (e.g., Aa et al., 2022; Gasque et al., 2022; Harding et al., 2022; Lin et al., 2022; Themens et al., 2022; Zhang et al., 2022). A supersonic pressure wave emanating radially from the volcano was observed in tropospheric water vapor images (Figure 1 in Amores et al., 2022) and at weather stations globally (Burt, 2022).…”