The 15 January 2022 Hunga Tonga event: Using Open Source to observe a volcanic eruption on a global scale in near real time

The explosive eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano on 15^th of January 2022 impacted the Earth, its oceans and atmosphere on a global scale. Witnesses report an audible “bang” as a result of the event in distances of up to several thousand kilometers. With infrasound sensors this sound wave can be detected where the frequency content or the amplitude of the signal renders the event inaudible to the human ear. Infrasound sensors are distributed globally, a selection of these stations upload their data in real time to publicly available servers. In combination with Open Source libraries such as obspy or scipy it is possible to use these data sources to observe the atmospheric disturbances caused by the eruption on a global scale in near real time. With a minimum of data processing not only the first arrival peak of the atmospheric lamb wave can be identified at most stations but also further passes of the wave as it propagates around the planet several times. Having large amounts of publicly available data is crucial in that process. New data chunks can be analyzed and displayed immediately while the signal is still ongoing because data access requests are not required. Additionally, having immediate access to a large dataset allows for big data analysis and reduces the necessity to consider outliers at individual stations and increases the chance to identify the signal after multiple days when overall signal to noise ratios have decreased.