Study: Tonga’s Hunga Eruption Produced Unprecedentedly Intense Lightning

Using high-resolution lightning data from four separate sources, never previously used all together, the researchers could peer into that plume, teasing out new phases of the eruption’s life cycle and gaining insights into the weird weather it created.

”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,” said Van Eaton, whose study is published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

She also said that the eruption on January 15, 2022, created volcanic plumes for at least 11 hours, much longer than the hour or two initially observed, which they found from looking at lightning data.

”It wasn’t just the lightning intensity that drew us in,” she said.

She and her colleagues were also puzzled by the concentric rings of lightning, centered on the volcano, which expanded and contracted over time.

”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,” said Van Eaton.

Intense, high-altitude turbulence was again found to be responsible.

The plume injected so much mass into the upper atmosphere that it sent out ripples in the volcanic cloud, like dropping pebbles in a pond. The lightning appeared to ‘surf’ these waves and move outward as 250-kilometer-wide rings.

Further, the Hunga volcanic eruption represented the phreatoplinian style of volcanism, which occurs when a large volume of magma erupts through water and is known only from previously recorded geological data.

”It was like unearthing a dinosaur and seeing it walk around on four legs,” Van Eaton said. ”Sort of takes your breath away.”

Source PTI