Hunga Tonga – Hunga Ha'apai

Project Title: Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai: a paradigm-changing eruption

Start date: 01/10/2024

End Date: 31/03/2028

Project summary:

The 2022 eruption of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai (HT-HH) is the most intense volcanic eruption in 30 years. The eruption challenges many preconceptions about the impact of volcanic plumes on the atmosphere and climate, and calls for new, more comprehensive methods for studying volcanic plumes. These would improve future monitoring capability and enhance understanding of plume dynamics and impacts.

Objectives:

Satellite data plays an important part of monitoring and studying volcanic plumes. The HT-HH eruption has identified a number of areas for improvement which can be adressed with new instrumentation making frequent global observations (unavailable for past eruptions).

This project will develop the next generation of satellite retrievals for the quantification of volcanic plume properties. These will be developed for the Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI): a meteorological satellite instrument with sensitivity to multiple types of volcanic plumes. The new retrievals will be more comprehensive: simultaneously obtaining information about water vapour, SO2, sulphate and volcanic ash, rather than treating them separately. This will make them valuable tools for both hazard detection and providing data to rapidly assess climate impacts. Working closely with the UK Met Office will ensure the newly developed tools can be used operationally for future eruptive events, so ensuring a lasting impact from the project.

Following the development of these retrievals, they will be applied, along with other datasets, to study the HT-HH in detail. Climate impact models and seasonal forecasts, initialized with results from the new satellite data, will be used to study the future impact of this eruption on climate and atmospheric dynamics. This will build a better understanding of this unusual event. The impact goes beyond this eruption, as applying the retrievals to study other eruptive events will help to improve understanding of volcanic plume dynamics.

The HT-HH eruption has raised numerous questions about volcanic plumes. It is likely that this will have a lasting impact on the direction of research over the next few decades, with this project playing a key role in this.

COMET investigators: