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Hunga Tonga-Hunga eruption sent enough water vapor into the stratosphere to 
cause a rapid change in chemistry.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/02/05/hunga-tonga-hunga-eruption-sent-enough-
water-vapor-into-the-stratosphere-to-cause-a-rapid-change-in-chemistry

From NOAA RESEARCH

The eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano on January 15, 2022, 
produced the largest underwater explosion ever recorded by modern scientific 
instruments, blasting an enormous amount of water and volcanic gases higher 
than any other eruption in the satellite era.

Two research papers have now detailed how that water vapor rapidly affected the 
Earth's stratosphere between 10 and 31 miles above the surface, causing an 
unexpectedly large loss of ozone and an unexpectedly rapid formation of 
aerosols. 

"Up until now, sulfur has been the primary focus of research on eruptions," 
said Elizabeth Asher, a CIRES research scientist now working at NOAA's Global 
Monitoring Laboratory. Asher led one of the two recent studies while at the 
NOAA's Chemical Sciences Laboratory. "Studying Hunga Tonga showed that other 
gases, like water vapor, can have a profound impact on these outcomes." 

Hunga Tonga offered a unique opportunity to observe the immediate atmospheric 
impacts of a massive volcanic eruption. When news broke of the eruption, Karen 
Rosenlof, a senior climate scientist at the Chemical Sciences Laboratory, 
immediately contacted colleagues on the island of La Réunion, which sits in the 
Indian Ocean 8,000 miles away from Hunga-Tonga but lay directly in the path of 
the dispersing eruptive plume. Only days later, Asher and several colleagues 
from CIRES, the University of Houston, and St. Edward's University were on 
flights bound for La Réunion carrying miniaturized atmospheric instruments in 
their baggage.

The rapid deployment of balloon-borne observations at Réunion Island confirmed 
the unprecedented amount of water vapor - an estimated 150 million tons - that 
was injected into the stratosphere by the eruption. The balloon payloads also 
carried instruments to measure ozone and sulfur dioxide, in addition to 
carrying a POPS (portable optical particle spectrometer) particle instrument to 
determine the abundance of injected aerosol, which was used to calculate the 
rate at which new aerosol particles were formed downwind of the volcano.

The rapid response observations by NOAA and partner scientists provided 
insights that would have been impossible if the measurements were a month 
later.

"Our measurements showed that stratospheric ozone concentrations decreased 
rapidly - by as much as 30% in air with the highest water vapor concentrations 
- in the immediate wake of the eruption," said Stephanie Evan, a scientist from 
the Laboratoire de l'Atmosphère et des Cyclones in France and lead author of 
the other recent study, published in the journal Science. Evan and colleagues 
continued to measure ozone concentrations depleted by around 5% across the 
Indian and Pacific oceans two weeks following the eruption.

This graphic depicts how the ejection of water vapor from Hunga-Tonga volcano 
accelerated ozone depletion in the stratosphere. Credit: Chelsea 
Thompson/Chemical Sciences Laboratory

https://i0.wp.com/wattsupwiththat.com/wp-
content/uploads/2024/02/Evan_HungaTonga_v4-1536x1154-1.png?resize=720%2C541
&ssl=1

Scientists have long understood fundamentally that chlorine-containing 
molecules react with sulfate aerosols containing water vapor in the 
stratosphere converting them to an active form that destroys ozone. According 
to Rosenlof, however, these were the first measurements that captured the 
effect. 

While Evan examined the impacts to ozone, Asher focused her attention on the 
particle measurements collected by the POPS. Volcanic aerosols are profoundly 
important for global climate, as demonstrated by the 1991 Mt. Pinatubo eruption 
that cooled the planet by 0.5°C (0.9°F) for nearly two years. They can also act 
as surfaces upon which rapid chemical reactions can take place, leading to the 
destruction of ozone.

By combining data from the balloon measurements with global satellite data, 
Asher and colleagues found that a large, dense layer of aerosol particles 
formed in the stratosphere faster than had ever been seen before. These 
findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

"The tremendous amount of water vapor that this volcano sent to the 
stratosphere led to a rapid production of sulfate aerosol particles that we 
were able to observe within days of the eruption," explained Asher. Under 
normal atmospheric conditions, sulfate aerosols form from sulfur dioxide on a 
timescale of about a month. In this case, rapid measurements provided critical 
clues for determining the chemical and microphysical processes required to 
cause these effects - clues that would have vanished if the measurements had 
been taken a month later. 

Such measurements are critical for furthering scientific understanding of 
aerosol processes in the stratosphere, which remain one of the largest sources 
of uncertainty in climate predictions. Volcanic eruptions in particular are of 
significant interest because they are considered natural analogs for 
stratospheric aerosol injection - a proposed method of climate intervention 
that would spread reflective particles like sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere 
to intercept solar radiation and cool the Earth's surface.

https://cires.colorado.edu/
https://csl.noaa.gov/
https://csl.noaa.gov/groups/csl6/instruments/pops/
https://gml.noaa.gov/
https://research.noaa.gov/2023/12/20/hunga-tonga-2022-eruption/
https://www.csl.noaa.gov/projects/b2sap/tr2ex/
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2219547120
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adg2551 

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