Tonga Eruption

[freddie]

This is a nice spin off of this eruption (holiday study) https://twitter.com/RARohde/status/1685971656198545408

The Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai eruption was unusually water rich (& sulfur poor), injecting ~150 million tonnes of water into the stratosphere, increasing global upper atmosphere water mass by ~15%.

As a powerful greenhouse gas, this water may have contributed to recent warming.

And probably to the massive downpours as well (my addition)

Schermafbeelding 2023-08-06 133745.png

I'd have to disagree with the link to downpours. The injection of water vapour was in to the stratosphere, which is effectively insulated from the troposphere where our weather "happens". True that the volcano probably added to the water vapour content of the troposphere too, but the scale of that tropospheric injection was insignificant alongside everyday weather processes (such as evaporation and convection).

[ConligWX]

Just came across an article regarding the aftermath of the eruption today.

https://phys.org/news/2023-11-massive-e ... amics.html

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2301994120