The plume ejected by the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai volcano in January entered the mesosphere, the layer of atmosphere above the stratosphere, twice during the eruption
at the University of Oxford. “If this had happened somewhere more populated it would have been incredibly devastating.”Simon Proud / Uni Oxford, RALSpace NCEO / Japan Meteorological Agency
Usually, scientists rely on the temperature of a volcanic cloud – and the surrounding clouds – to calculate how high a volcanic plume reaches. But with the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai eruption the plume was too high for this method to work. Instead, Proud and his colleagues used satellite data and the parallax effect, where the exact location of objects can shift according to where they are viewed from, to help calculate the exact height of the plume.“We’re using images from a few different weather satellites that all look at a different angle at this volcano,” he says. “If you have different estimates from different angles, you can figure out the height very exactly.
Volcanic eruptions that reach the mesosphere are incredibly rare, and this is the first time scientists have been able to confirm an occurrence. The last eruption on this scale is likely to have been the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa. Proud says this new method of measuring volcano plume height could also be useful to assess the height of storm clouds as they gather steam, and so estimate their severity.
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