Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai volcano eruption, Tonga, Tsunami(s)

[berkeman]

Wow.

 

[Astronuc]

Wow.

It's all a WOW event, but I was really amazed that the shockwave pushed/bulged the atmosphere, which I suppose shouldn't be a surprise given the scale of the explosion and the visible wave front traveling across the Pacific ocean.

 

[Astronuc]

Update - Tonga's volcano sent tons of water into the stratosphere. That could warm the Earth?

https://www.npr.org/2022/08/03/1115378385/tonga-volcano-stratosphere-water-warming

The violent eruption of Tonga's Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano injected an unprecedented amount of water directly into the stratosphere — and the vapor will stay there for years, likely affecting the Earth's climate patterns, NASA scientists say.

The massive amount of water vapor is roughly 10% of the normal amount of vapor found in the stratosphere, equaling more than 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2022GL099381

 

[Astronuc]

The initial tsunami wave created by the eruption of the underwater Hunga Tonga Ha'apai volcano in Tonga in January 2022 reached 90 meters in height, around nine times taller than that from the highly destructive 2011 Japan tsunami, new research has found.

https://phys.org/news/2022-08-tonga-volcano-eruption-metersnine-taller.html

By comparison, the largest tsunami waves due to earthquakes before the Tonga event were recorded following the Tōhoku earthquake near Japan in 2011 and the 1960 Chilean earthquake, reached 10 meters in initial height. Those were more destructive as they happened closer to land, with waves that were wider.

 

[Astronuc]

Volcanologists determined the explosion's plume of ash and water from Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai reached over 35 miles (105 km) high, the highest ever observed (some satellites used to observe Hunga Tonga weren't around for earlier eruptions, e.g., Pinatubo, 1991), reaching into the mesosphere.

To figure out the extraordinary height of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai's plume, the researchers used images gathered from three different weather satellites operated by three different nations: The U.S.'s GOES-17, Japan's Himawari-8, and South Korea's GK-2A. The pictures, sent back every 10 minutes, allowed the team to see the great blast from a variety of angles, and ultimately deduce the volcanic cloud's height.

https://mashable.com/article/volcano-eruption-highest-ever-plume-record-tonga

The January 2022 eruption of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano reached the mesosphere
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abo4076About 7 years and two weeks from the 2014 eruption.
https://www.physicsforums.com/threa...apai-eruption-in-tonga-near-nukualofa.789761/

 

[Astronuc]

"The historic volcanic eruption at Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai, a submarine volcano in the southern Pacific Ocean, about 65 km north of Tongatapu, Tonga's main island, was the largest since 1883 (Krakatoa/Krakatau between Java and Sumatra), and it caused a series of extraordinary occurrences, including a tsunami that reached as far as Japan and the Americas and shot a mind-boggling plume of water vapour into Earth’s stratosphere – enough to fill more than 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools."
Ref: https://www.yahoo.com/news/powerful-volcanic-eruption-spurs-events-154945664.html

“We’ve never seen anything like it,” Luis Millán, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California who led a study analyzing the volcano's water vapour, said in August 20022. (article mentions 2002)
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/to...precedented-amount-of-water-into-stratosphere
AGU paper - https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022GL102341

Never-before-seen lightning intensity
At its peak intensity, the eruption generated 2,615 lightning flashes per minute, lasting for approximately five minutes. This replaces the previous record set in 1999, where 993 flashes per minute occurred over the southern United States.

Impressive "lightning holes"​

Following the eruption, the ash plume rapidly expanded outward in circular ripples, known as gravity waves. These waves triggered the formation of donut-shaped rings of lightning that surfed along their crests, with some of the rings measuring up to 280 km in diameter.

1883 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krakatoa , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1883_eruption_of_Krakatoa

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/the-1883-krakatau-eruption-a-year-of-blue-moons.html
https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikispeedia/wpcd/wp/k/Krakatoa.htm