The January 2022 Hunga Volcano explosive eruption from the multitechnological perspective of CTBT monitoring

Abstract

Summary The massive eruption of the Hunga Volcano on 15 January 2022 provides an ideal test case for reviewing established methods to discriminate and analyse source processes. Discriminating source mechanisms and identifying their origins is a key task when analysing suspicious events in the frame of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. Earthquakes and explosions can be distinguished in some cases using well established methods such as inversion for the seismic moment tensor. In more complex cases the combination of analyses of the seismic, infrasonic and hydroacoustic waveform content can be of help. More challenging is the discrimination of the specific kind of explosive source such as a nuclear test and a volcano eruption based on the data from the three waveform technologies alone. Here, we apply standard techniques destined to analyse relevant events in the frame of the CTBT, i. e. all three waveform technologies (seismology, infrasound, and hydroacoustic) and atmospheric transport modelling of radionuclides. We investigate the potential of standard analysis methods to discriminate a source and identify their possible weaknesses. We show that the methods applied here work very well to identify, investigate, and discriminate an explosive event. During discrimination we could not only exclude a shear-source (i. e. earthquake) but also distinguish the volcanic explosion in contrast to a man-made explosion. However, some tasks remain difficult with the available methods. These tasks include the reliable estimation of the strength of a non-shear event and thereupon a yield estimation of a possibly CTBT relevant event. In addition to evaluating our methods, we could relate our results with specific phases of the eruption process providing a more detailed insight of what happened. Our investigations of the eruption details only provide a starting point for further in-depth analysis. However, they underline the importance of the Hunga eruption event for science. The huge amount of observations provide a unique opportunity for knowledge gain in several sub-disciplines of the geosciences. In addition, although not being a nuclear test, it also provides a useful and important data set for further developing multi-technology analyses in the frame of the CTBT.