Tonga Volcano Eruption Will Help Scientists Predict Weather, Climate Change: Report

The January eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano offered scientists a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to investigate how the atmosphere functions, unlocking secrets to better anticipate the weather and changing climate, a report in Newsweek said.

The volcano, which is located in the South Pacific country of Tonga, became active on December 20, 2021, and erupted on January 15, 2022.

The blast was more powerful than an atomic weapon and demolished one of the country's numerous islands, said American space agency NASA.

The volcano began to emit a thick cloud of black ash, sulphur dioxide, and steam in the weeks leading up to the eruption. When the volcano erupted, it destroyed numerous homes on adjacent islands with 100,000 times the intensity of the Hiroshima nuclear bomb, put out a pressure wave that circled the globe many times, and generated a cloud of ejecta that towered over 30 miles high, Newsweek reported.

The magnitude of the force caused by the eruption was revealed in a study published in the journal Nature. According to the paper, the first explosion caused a wide range of atmospheric waves, including Lamb waves moving at roughly 715 mph at surface level and in the stratosphere, and gravity waves travelling up to 600 mph in the stratosphere.

This was the first time that gravity waves were observed travelling at such high speeds.

Mathew Barlow, a faculty member in UMass Lowell's Climate Change Initiative, said in the study that the wave types the explosion generated will play a key role in making effective computer models for weather forecasting and climate projections.

"Through the expulsion of particles into the high atmosphere, some strong eruptions can also have a cooling effect on the climate, though the amount produced by Hunga Tonga does not appear sufficient for a notable climate effect, unlike other volcanic eruptions over the last century, like the Pinatubo eruption in Alaska in 1991," he added.

Researchers from the University of Bath led the team, which included researchers from 10 institutions.