Researchers found over 200,000 flashes of lightning during the Hunga volcano eruption in 2022, with as many as 2,600 flashes a minute at its peak.
“This eruption triggered a supercharged thunderstorm, the likes of which we’ve never seen,” Alexa Van Eaton, a US Geological Survey volcanologist who led the study, said in a
. “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.”“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. “It turns out, volcanic eruptions can create more extreme lightning than any other kind of storm on Earth.
It turns out that the lightning also revealed more about the eruption itself than was previously understood, specifically that it lasted much longer than initially thought. “The eruption lasted much longer than the hour or two initially observed,” Van Eaton said. “The January 15 activity created volcanic plumes for at least 11 hours. It was really only from looking at the lightning data that we were able to pull that out.”, depending on the plume height and the intensity of the lightning flashes. Hopefully, this connection between eruption activity and lightning will allow better modeling of eruptions for ash dispersal to better manage air traffic around eruptions.
“The scale of these lightning rings blew our minds. We’ve never seen anything like that before, there’s nothing comparable in meteorological storms. Single lightning rings have been observed, but not multiples, and they’re tiny by comparison.”“It was like unearthing a dinosaur and seeing it walk around on four legs,” Van Eaton said. “Sort of takes your breath away.”
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