Studying the global propagation of gravity waves generated by the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai volcanic eruption from meteor radar observations and the High-Altitude General Mechanistic Circulation Model
- 1University Bern, Institute of Applied Physics, Microwave Physics, Bern, Switzerland (gunter.stober@unibe.ch)
- 2North West Research Associates (NWRA), Boulder, Colorado, USA
- 3Center for Space and Atmospheric Research and Department of Physical Sciences, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach, Florida, USA
- 4Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory, University of Oulu, Finland
- 5ITM Physics Laboratory, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA
- *A full list of authors appears at the end of the abstract
The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai (HTHH) volcanic eruption on 15th January 2022 was an unprecedented event and a unique opportunity to investigate volcanic-caused gravity waves (GW) and their global propagation. In this study, we have combined all the available meteor radar observations and data analysis to identify the HTHH GW in the observations. Our results are compared to model-based wind perturbations from HIAMCM of secondary waves that are forced by the GW model MESORAC using GOES-17 observations. Furthermore, we leverage the GW polarization relations to identify different wave features in the observations and perturbation runs with HIAMCM. There is a remarkable agreement in the observed phase speeds for the eastward and westward GW propagation between the observations and HIAMCM wind perturbations indicating that the mesospheric HTHH GW are explainable by secondary waves generated by breaking of the primary GWs from the eruption. We also shed some light on the importance of the quasi-2-day wave on the HTHH GW propagation.
Gunter Stober, Sharon L. Vadas, Erich Becker, Alan Liu, Alexander Kozlovsky, Diego Janches, Zishun Qiao, Witali Krochin, Guochun Shi, Wen Yi, Jie Zeng, Peter Brown, Denis Vida, Neil Hindley, Nicholas Mitchell, Tracy Moffatt-Griffin, Christoph Jacobi, Damian Murphy, Ricardo Buriti, Vania Andrioli, Paulo Prado Batista, John Marino, Scott Palo, Denise Thorsen, Masaki Tsutsumi, Njål Gulbrandsen, Satonori Nozawa, Mark Lester, Kathrin Baumgarten, Johan Kero, Evgenia Belova, Nicholas Mitchell, and Na Li
How to cite: Stober, G., Vadas, S., Becker, E., Liu, A., Kozlovsky, A., and Janches, D. and the HTHH Meteor radar and HIAMCM GW analysis team:: Studying the global propagation of gravity waves generated by the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai volcanic eruption from meteor radar observations and the High-Altitude General Mechanistic Circulation Model, EGU General Assembly 2024, Vienna, Austria, 14–19 Apr 2024, EGU24-15128, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-15128, 2024.
