JenLucPiquant
Jennifer Ouellette
@JenLucPiquant@universeodon.com

Tonga Volcano Eruption Created Highest Lightning Rates Ever Recorded On Earth

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2023/06/21/tonga-volcano-eruption-created-highest-lightning-rates-ever-recorded-on-earth/?sh=436047ff2c6f

New research shows that the plume emitted by the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano eruption on January 15, 2022, created the highest lightning flash rates ever recorded on Earth, more than any storm ever documented.

"The eruption of Hunga Volcano was the largest volcanic explosion since Krakatau in 1883," said atmospheric physicist Sonja Behnke, of Los Alamos National Laboratory's Electromagnetic Sciences and Cognitive Space Applications group and author on the paper. It was a phreatoplinian eruption, which occurs when a large volume of magma erupts through water. Previously, this eruption style was only known from the geological record and had never been observed with modern instrumentation according to a news statement by the American Geophysical Union.

Powerful volcanic eruptions produce ash plumes that can create huge amounts of static electricity, produced by movements and collisions between ash particles, and even their own weather systems, providing the conditions for lightning at higher altitudes than normally seen. When the undersea volcano in Tonga erupted, it created a plume that went more than 25 miles higher than typical thunderstorms. Lightning was observed at stratospheric altitudes (12 to 18 miles), where the air pressure is too low to support thunderstorm-like lightning. This fast-rising volcanic plume may have created locally higher pressures to support the environment necessary for lightning.

After reaching its maximum height, the plume expanded outward as an umbrella cloud, creating fast-moving circular ripples known as gravity waves, similar to a rock dropped in a pond. Donut-shaped rings of lightning expanded with the umbrella cloud and were as large as 174 miles in diameter. Similar "lightning holes" have been observed in thunderstorms, but never on this large of a scale.