The January 15, 2022, eruption of Hunga Volcano in Tonga continues to break records. According to a new study, the eruption created a “supercharged” thunderstorm that produced the most intense lightning ever recorded. There were nearly 200,000 lightning flashes in the volcanic plume throughout the eruption, peaking at more than 2,600 flashes every minute, the researchers found.
The January 15, 2022, eruption of Hunga Volcano in Tonga continues to break records. According to a new study, the eruption created a “supercharged” thunderstorm that produced the most intense lightning ever recorded. There were nearly 200,000 lightning flashes in the volcanic plume throughout the eruption, peaking at more than 2,600 flashes every minute, the researchers found.
When the submarine volcano erupted in the southern Pacific Ocean, it generated a plume of ash, water and magmatic gas at least 58 kilometers (36 miles) high. The towering plume gave scientists useful information about the scale of the eruption, but it also obscured the vent from satellite view, making it more difficult to track changes in the eruption as it progressed.
High-resolution lightning data from four separate sources — never previously used all together — have now let scientists peer into that plume, teasing out new phases of the eruption’s life cycle and gaining insights into the weird weather it created.
“This eruption triggered a supercharged thunderstorm, the likes of which we’ve never seen,” said Alexa Van Eaton, a volcanologist at the United States Geological Survey who led the 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.”
Read more at American Geophysical Union
Image: The 15 January 2022 eruption of Tonga’s Hunga Volcano produced a “supercharged” storm in the plume that had the most intense lightning ever recorded in a storm, according to a new study in AGU’s journal Geophysical Research Letters. Credit: Felix Mittermeier/Unsplash
