Multiple airwaves crossing Britain and Ireland following the eruption of Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha'apai on 15 January 2022

Tonga volcanic eruption and tsunami, January 2022: globally the most significant opportunity to observe an explosive and tsunamigenic submarine eruption since AD 1883 Krakatau

“…The first atmospheric gravity waves were observed across the entire planet within a few hours, and some possessed sufficient energy to circle the planet multiple times (Yuen et al 2022). A barometric pressure jump of approximately 2 hPa was recorded globally (Burt 2022): for example at 07:30 UTC in Sydney, Australia (Risk Frontiers 2022b) and 11:00 UTC in Japan (Kataoka et al 2022), i.e. 3½ h and 7 h after the first large eruption, respectively.…”

“…It is appreciated that both the knowledge pool and scientific literature specific to the January 2022 HTHH eruption are rapidly growing. In spite of the fact that field-based studies in Tonga have been hampered by the global Covid pandemic, several research groups have already begun looking into many facets of the event from different perspectives, especially volcanological, atmospheric, tsunamigenic, geospatial, and numerical modelling aspects (for example Amores et al 2022;Burt 2022;Carvajal et al 2022;Cronin et al 2022;Harrison 2022;Tanioka et al 2022;Yuen et al 2022;Zuo et al 2022). This spontaneous surge in scientific interest is also evidenced by the dedicated scientific sessions focusing exclusively on the Tongan eruption and tsunamis scheduled at the 2022 conferences of both the European Geophysical Union (EGU 2022) and the Asia Oceania Geosciences Society (AOGS 2022), in May and August 2022, respectively.…”

Multi-instrument detection in Europe of ionospheric disturbances caused by the 15 January 2022 eruption of the Hunga volcano

“…Themens et al (2022) indeed find that large scale TIDs produced directly in the thermosphere above the eruption dissipate after a few thousand kilometres. However, medium scale TIDs travelling with the Lamb wave front seem to propagate further (Themens et al, 2022;Zhang et al, 2022), and clear signatures of waves travelling around the globe in the lower atmosphere have been detected (Burt, 2022;Matoza et al, 2022;Wright et al, 2022). Waves might thus be expected to appear in the ionosphere either at the same time as the ground-level pressure disturbances, for the Lamb waves, or with MUF delay for disturbances propagating upwards from the troposphere.…”

“…A volcanic eruption can produce waves of all these types, which will propagate outward from the eruption with different velocities and to different distances before dissipating. For this event, a Lamb wave was detected as the leading wavefront, followed by various disturbances of different natures (Burt, 2022;Kubota et al, 2022;Kulichkov et al, 2022;Saito, 2022). In this study, we look for disturbances in the ionosphere over Europe, close to the antipode of the eruption.…”

Global shockwaves of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano eruption measured at ground stations

“… Yuen et al. (2022) reported that the eruption started at 0402 UTC and drastically increased at 0408 UTC; others reported that it started at 0415 UTC ( Burt, 2022 ), or before 0410 UTC ( Smart, 2022 ) according to the satellite images ( Bachmeier, 2022 ). This volcano was in the southern Pacific at (20.55° S, 175.385°W), approximately 1900 km north-northeast of New Zealand, 3200 km east of Australia, and 600 km southeast of Fiji.…”