![]() 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. 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 January 15, 2022, with times shown in UTC. 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. Lightning data reveal previously unknown phases of the eruption, inform future volcanic hazard monitoring.Lightning “surfed” giant waves that rippled through volcanic plume.The plume produced the highest-altitude lightning flashes ever measured, 20 to 30 kilometers (12 to 19 miles) above sea level.The January 15 eruption lasted at least 11 hours, several hours longer than previously known.Scientists used the lightning to peer into the ash cloud, teasing out new details of the eruption’s timeline. The eruption produced 2,600 flashes per minute at peak intensity. New analyses of the eruption’s lightning intensity revealed the volcanic storm was the most intense ever recorded and provided new insights into the eruption’s progression. More than 200,000 lightning flashes, shown as blue dots, occurred throughout the duration of the eruption at Tonga’s Hunga Volcano on January 15, 2022.
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