Atmospheric wave energy of the 2020 August 4 explosion in Beirut, Lebanon, from ionospheric disturbances
- 1Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sci., NIT Rourkela, Rourkela 769008, India.
- 2Department of Earth and Planetary Sci., Hokkaido Univ., Sapporo, Hokkaido 060-0810, Japan
Atmospheric waves excited by strong surface explosions, both natural and anthropogenic, often disturb upper atmosphere. In this letter, we report an N-shaped pulse with period ~1.3 minutes propagating southward at ~0.8 km/s, observed as changes in ionospheric total electron content using continuous GNSS stations in Israel and Palestine, ~10 minutes after the August 4, 2020 chemical explosion in Beirut, Lebanon. The peak-to-peak amplitude of the disturbance reached ~2% of the background electrons, comparable to recently recorded volcanic explosions in the Japanese Islands. We also succeeded in reproducing the observed disturbances assuming acoustic waves propagating upward and their interaction with geomagnetic fields.
Keywords: Chemical explosion, Beirut, N-shaped pulse, Total electron content
How to cite: Kundu, B., Senapati, B., Matsushita, A., and Heki, K.: Atmospheric wave energy of the 2020 August 4 explosion in Beirut, Lebanon, from ionospheric disturbances , EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-1936, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-1936, 2021.
