![]() ![]() "With this eruption, we discovered that volcanic plumes can create the conditions for lightning far beyond the realm of meteorological thunderstorms we've previously observed," Van Eaton said. Some of this lightning reached unprecedented altitudes in Earth's atmosphere, between 20 to 30 kilometers (12 to 19 miles) high. The eruption produced just over 192,000 flashes (made up of nearly 500,000 electrical pulses), peaking at 2,615 flashes per minute. ![]() The perfect storm for lightning.Ĭombining data from sensors that measure light and radio waves, the scientists tracked lightning flashes and estimated their heights. Molten rock vaporized the seawater, which rose up into the plume and eventually formed electrifying collisions between volcanic ash, supercooled water and hailstones. The storm developed because the highly energetic expulsion of magma happened to blast through the shallow ocean, Van Eaton said. The study was published in Geophysical Research Letters, which publishes high-impact, short-format reports with immediate implications spanning all Earth and space sciences. "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." "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. 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. 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. 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. 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. ![]() According to a new study, the eruption created a "supercharged" thunderstorm that produced the most intense lightning ever recorded. The January 15, 2022, eruption of Hunga Volcano in Tonga continues to break records. Credit: Geophysical Research Letters (2023). White dashed polygons outline the lightning locations, showing their westward movement with the stratospheric umbrella cloud. Westward advection of the upper umbrella starts to reveal a lower level cloud by 05:37. Pink circles outline the lightning ring in two frames, showing an (average) expansion rate exceeding 60 m s −1. The initial and most prominent ring (visible in the first four frames) concentrated at the leading edge of a gravity wave within the upper umbrella cloud. At least four distinct lightning rings occur from 04:16 to 05:51 followed by a final ring from 08:38–08:48. (*) indicates frames with optically detected lightning. ![]() Grayscale gives stereoscopic cloud heights, blue dots show lightning flashes detected by ground-based radio frequency networks over the following minute, and purple-yellow color scale shows optically detected lightning from the GLM sensor. Maps of volcanic plume and lightning development on 15 January 2022, with times shown in UTC. ![]()
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