More than 200,000 lightning flashes, revealed as blue dots, took place throughout the period of the eruption at Tonga’s Hunga Volcano on January 15,2022 New analyses of the eruption’s lightning strength exposed the volcanic storm was the most extreme ever taped and supplied brand-new insights into the eruption’s development. Credit: Van Eaton et al. (2023), Geophysical Research Letters, doi: 10.1029/2022 GL102341
The eruption produced 2,600 flashes per minute at peak strength. Scientists utilized the lightning to peer into the ash cloud, teasing out brand-new information of the eruption’s timeline.
- The January 15 eruption lasted a minimum of 11 hours, numerous hours longer than formerly understood
- The plume produced the highest-altitude lightning flashes ever determined, 20 to 30 kilometers (12 to 19 miles) above water level
- Lightning “surfed” huge waves that rippled through volcanic plume
- Lightning information expose formerly unidentified stages of the eruption, notify future volcanic risk tracking
The January 15, 2022, eruption of Hunga Volcano in Tonga continues to exceed. According to a brand-new research study, the eruption produced a “supercharged” thunderstorm that produced the most extreme lightning ever taped. There were almost 200,000 lightning flashes in the volcanic plume throughout the eruption, peaking at more than 2,600 flashes every minute, the scientists discovered.
When the submarine volcano appeared in the southern Pacific Ocean, it produced a plume of ash, water, and magmatic gas a minimum of 58 kilometers (36 miles) high. The towering plume offered researchers helpful details about the scale of the eruption, however it likewise obscured the vent from satellite view, making it harder to track modifications in the eruption as it advanced.
Maps of volcanic plume and lightning advancement on January 15, 2022, with times displayed in UTC. Grayscale offers stereoscopic cloud heights, blue dots reveal lightning flashes identified by ground-based radio frequency networks over the following minute, and purple-yellow color scale reveals optically identified lightning from the GLM sensing unit. shows frames with optically identified lightning. At least 4 unique lightning rings happen from 04: 16 to 05: 51 followed by a last ring from 08: 38–08:48 The preliminary and most popular ring (noticeable in the very first 4 frames) focused at the leading edge of a gravity wave within the upper umbrella cloud. Pink circles lay out the lightning ring in 2 frames, revealing an (average) growth rate going beyond 60 m s − 1. Westward advection of the upper umbrella begins to expose a lower level cloud by 05:37 White rushed polygons lay out the lightning places, revealing their westward motion with the dizzying umbrella cloud. Local islands are described in black. Credit: Van Eaton et al. (2023), Geophysical Research Letters, doi: 10.1029/2022 GL102341
High- resolution lightning information from 4 different sources– never ever formerly utilized completely– have now let researchers peer into that plume, teasing out brand-new stages of the eruption’s life process and acquiring insights into the unusual weather condition it produced.
“This eruption triggered a supercharged thunderstorm, the likes of which we’ve never seen,” stated Alexa Van Eaton, a volcanologist at the United States Geological Survey who led the research study. “These findings demonstrate a new tool we have to monitor volcanoes at the speed of light and help the USGS’s role to inform ash hazard advisories to aircraft.”
The research study was released in Geophysical Research Letters, which releases high-impact, short-format reports with instant ramifications covering all Earth and area sciences.
The storm established since the extremely energetic expulsion of lava occurred to blast through the shallow ocean, Van Eaton stated. Molten rock vaporized the seawater, which rose into the plume and ultimately formed electrifying crashes in between ashes, supercooled water, and hailstones. The ideal storm for lightning.
More than 200,000 lightning flashes, revealed as blue dots, took place throughout the period of the eruption at Tonga’s Hunga Volcano on January 15,2022 New analyses of the eruption’s lightning strength exposed the volcanic storm was the most extreme ever taped and supplied brand-new insights into the eruption’s development. Credit: Van Eaton et al. (2023), Geophysical Research Letters, doi: 10.1029/2022 GL102341
Combining information from sensing units that determine light and radio waves, the researchers tracked lightning flashes and approximated their heights. The eruption produced simply over 192,000 flashes (comprised of almost 500,000 electrical pulses), peaking at 2,615 flashes per minute. Some of this lightning reached extraordinary elevations in Earth’s environment, in between 20 to 30 kilometers (12 to 19 miles) high.
“With this eruption, we discovered that volcanic plumes can create the conditions for lightning far beyond the realm of meteorological thunderstorms we’ve previously observed,” Van Eaton stated. “It turns out, volcanic eruptions can create more extreme lightning than any other kind of storm on Earth.”
The lightning supplied insight into not just the period of the eruption, however likewise its habits gradually.
“The eruption lasted much longer than the hour or two initially observed,” Van Eaton stated. “The January 15 activity created volcanic plumes for at least 11 hours. It was really only from looking at the lightning data that we were able to pull that out.”
The scientists saw 4 unique stages of eruptive activity, specified by plume heights and lightning rates as they waxed and subsided. The insights gotten from connecting lightning strength to eruptive activity can supply much better tracking and nowcasting of aviation-related risks throughout a big volcanic eruption, consisting of ash cloud advancement and motion, Van Eaton stated. It’s a substantial difficulty to get dependable details about volcanic plumes at the start of an eruption, particularly for remote, submarine volcanoes. Harnessing all the long-range observations readily available, consisting of lightning, enhances early detection to keep airplane and individuals out of damage’s method.
“It wasn’t just the lightning intensity that drew us in,” Van Eaton stated. She and her coworkers were likewise puzzled by the concentric rings of lightning, fixated the volcano, which broadened and contracted gradually. “The scale of these lightning rings blew our minds. We’ve never seen anything like that before, there’s nothing comparable in meteorological storms. Single lightning rings have been observed, but not multiples, and they’re tiny by comparison.”
Intense, high-altitude turbulence was once again accountable. The plume injected a lot mass into the upper environment that it sent ripples in the volcanic cloud, like dropping pebbles in a pond. The lightning appeared to ‘surf’ these waves and move external as 250- kilometer-wide rings.
As if all that wasn’t enough to make this eruption interesting, it represents a design of volcanism referred to as phreatoplinian, which happens when a big volume of lava appears through water. Previously, this eruption design was just understood from the geological record and had actually never ever been observed with modern-day instrumentation. The Hunga eruption altered all that.
“It was like unearthing a dinosaur and seeing it walk around on four legs,” Van Eaton stated. “Sort of takes your breath away.”
Reference: “Lightning Rings and Gravity Waves: Insights Into the Giant Eruption Plume From Tonga’s Hunga Volcano on 15 January 2022” by Alexa R. Van Eaton, Jeff Lapierre, Sonja A. Behnke, Chris Vagasky, Christopher J. Schultz, Michael Pavolonis, Kristopher Bedka and Konstantin Khlopenkov, 20 June 2023, Geophysical Research Letters
DOI: 10.1029/2022 GL102341
