Where are our climate and weather scientists?

In 2022, the world has experienced a series of unusual weather events. UN Secretary-General António Guterres recently stated “Floods, droughts, heatwaves, extreme storms and wildfires are going from bad to worse, breaking records with alarming frequency. Heatwaves in Europe. Colossal floods in Pakistan. Prolonged and severe droughts in China, the Horn of Africa and the United States. There is nothing natural about the new scale of these disasters. They are the price of humanity’s fossil fuel addiction.”

Volcanoes are capable of emitting large amounts of material into the upper levels of the atmosphere and major eruptions have been linked to changes in weather patterns. 

Pinatubo (1991), the 2^nd largest eruption of the 20^th century, released large amounts of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere and is thought to have reduced average global temperatures by up to 0.5° C for 3 years.

The eruption of Tambora (1815) gave Europe and North America a ‘“Year without Summer”.

In 2022, we had the unique circumstances of the eruption of the submarine Tongan Volcano (Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai). Holger Voemelfrom the US National Center for Atmospheric Research noted that mixing hot volcanic material with cool ocean water created an explosion that sent atmospheric shockwaves around the planet. The resulting plume contained a volume of water vapour large enough to interfere with satellite observations of weather patterns.

As with other major eruptions, some of the Tongan Volcano’s plume would have been blasted into the troposphere and stratosphere, impacting on cloud formations at those atmospheric levels. (Unlike Pinatubo, Tonga emitted very little sulphur.)

Notably, the Tongan Volcano plume also penetrated the mesosphere. (The mesosphere begins at 50km above the earth’s surface, stretching out to 80 km.)  By contrast, most other eruptions such as Pinatubo and Krakatoa (1883) only penetrated the stratosphere (which sits below the mesosphere).  Accordingly, the Tongan Volcano could be expected to create more unusual and longer-lasting impacts on global weather patterns.

Measured levels of stratospheric water vapour in the vicinity of the Tongan Volcano were 580 times greater than normal background levels in the days after the eruption (and after the plume had spread somewhat). In what may be suggestive of other impacts, locations in the Inland desert region of Australia such as Alice Springs began to receive heavy rainfall, two days after the volcanic explosion on January 14, continuing for the next two days and Uluru further west received exceptionally heavy falls the next day. This was extremely unusual weather for this region.

Another aspect affecting weather from the volcanic eruption was the enormous impact on the atmosphere and the consequent effects on weather patterns as noted by Dr Osprey from Oxford who stated “The eruption might have lasted moments, but the impacts could be long-lasting. Gravity waves can interfere with a cyclical reversal of wind direction in the tropics, and this could affect weather patterns as far away as Europe.” In this context, ‘gravity waves’ are the scientific term for the atmospheric shock waves and were recorded as travelling around the world at least six times.

The unique circumstances of the Tongan Volcano provide a potentially priceless ‘natural experiment’ for identifying and quantifying the impact of volcanic activity on climate change.  

Collection and analysis of this data could help in separating the contributions to climate change resulting from natural and human factors.

The extent to which the data generated by the Tongan Volcano has been collected seems less clear. I do not know if CSIRO and the BOM have the appropriate equipment for measuring the volcanic water vapour and particles in the atmosphere but they could contact NASA and other organisations monitoring atmospheric conditions with satellites and weather balloons that are operational around the world.