New Insights on Atmospheric Waves from the Hunga Volcanic Eruption – GWC Mag

Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors.

Source: Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres

The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcanic eruption in January 2022 was the most explosive eruption of the past several decades. Global-scale atmospheric waves were identified early after the eruption using full-Earth geostationary images (with 10- or 15-minute cadence), including a large amplitude Lamb wave which circled the Earth several times (e.g. Wright et al., 2022).

In a new study, Horváth et al. [2024] use higher resolution mesoscale (about 1,000 kilometers) geostationary measurements at 1-minute intervals to deduce more detailed variations in wave structures, providing accurate links to surface pressure measurements along with a well-resolved eruption chronology. Absolute temperature perturbations produced by the eruption are generally difficult to extract due to large dynamic range and variable background, and this work uses the common technique of differencing image sequences (as shown in top image) to reveal short-period variations and individual shocks from the eruption. 

The results from 1-minute satellite imagery show good agreement with surface pressure measurements from a station nearby the eruption at Pago Pago, Samoa (indicated in top image), and these data provide new estimates of atmospheric wave behavior along with the Hunga eruption timing and chronology.

Citation: Horváth, Á., Vadas, S. L., Stephan, C. C., & Buehler, S. A. (2024). One-minute resolution GOES-R observations of Lamb and gravity waves triggered by the Hunga Tonga-hunga Ha’apai eruptions on 15 January 2022. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 129, e2023JD039329. https://doi.org/10.1029/2023JD039329

—William J. Randel, Editor, JGR: Atmospheres

Text © 2024. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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