Rick Adkisson

I would be curious about how much water vapor didnt reach the stratosphere and got added tonthe troposphere from that eruption and whether that would have any effect?

The initial study I saw had around 39 billion gallons being injected into the stratosphere, but have read that could be off by a factor of 3. Wondering if anyone has seen anything else?

Bjørn K Vottestad adds"

Water vapour heating started to dominate the top-of-the-atmosphere radiative forcing, leading to a net warming of the climate system.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-022-00618-z

Tonga eruption increases chance of temporary surface temperature anomaly above 1.5 °C
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01568-2

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-022-00652-x.pdf

New research suggests 150-million metric tons or almost 40 Trillion gallons of water vapor was injected into the upper-atmosphere. A lot of it is still up there floating around.

Siege in the Southern Stratosphere: Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai Water Vapor Excluded From the 2022 Antarctic Polar Vortex
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2023GL103855

Prior research into the eruption found that Tonga ejected enough water vapor to fill 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools, and that this prodigious amount of atmospheric moisture could potentially weaken the ozone layer, Live Science previously reported.

In the new study, the scientists also determined that these enormous quantities of water vapor could indeed modify chemical cycles that control stratospheric ozone, "however, detailed studies will be required to quantify the effect on the amount of ozone because other chemical reactions may play a role as well."
https://www.space.com/tonga-eruption-water-vapor-warm-earth?fbclid=IwAR1DqXjr5tmeDOeDYrwCTC2Vr5LWjj-EQnokxCpKmgfdiRYWhvyl0hArBDg

Tonga's eruption injected so much water into Earth’s atmosphere that it could weaken the ozone layer
This excess water, the researchers warned, could have a radiating effect that could warm the atmosphere much as greenhouse gases do. Because the water is likely to stick around longer than other volcanic gases, like sulfur dioxide — which normally fall out of the atmosphere within two to three years — the water's warming effect will likely outlast any cooling effects the gases create.

This means the Tonga explosion will likely be the first eruption on record to cause a warming effect, rather than a cooling effect, on the planet, researchers wrote.
https://www.livescience.com/tonga-eruption-water-vapor

The global warming caused by Hunga-Tonga is significant. The eruption of Hunga-Tonga increased the water vapor mass in the stratosphere by 13%, and it will remain there for many years to come.
https://climaterealism.com/2023/07/the-tonga-underwater-volcano-eruption-may-have-had-a-larger-warming-effect-than-originally-reported/?fbclid=IwAR1enGmqgC46GRO56uXXEMZiD7XOKTsgVEiiN0XKHIDKo1HwxjML4LzRR6s

This eruption could impact climate not through surface cooling due to sulfate aerosols, but rather through surface warming due to the radiative forcing from the excess stratospheric H2O.
In addition to particulate matter, volcanic eruptions can loft large quantities of gases into the stratosphere. Although around 80% of this gas volume can be magmatic H2O (Coffey, 1996; Pinto et al., 1989), up to 90% of the volcanically emitted humidity is usually removed by condensation at the cold point tropopause (Glaze et al., 1997). Considerable amounts of CO2 and SO2 are also often found in volcanic plumes, along with HCl and other trace gases (e.g., Carn et al., 2016). SO2 reacts with H2O and OH to form submicron sulfate aerosols that reflect solar radiation, lowering surface temperature. For example, the radiative influence of the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption "put an end to several years of globally warm surface temperature” (McCormick et al., 1995), illustrating the capacity of volcanic eruptions to substantially alter global climate.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022GL099381

The 2022 Hunga-Tonga megatsunami: Near-field simulation of a once-in-a-century event
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adf5493

》Within days of the eruption, a team of scientists from NOAA converged on Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean with an array of specialized instruments — including one designed by Vömel — to take readings of the eruption’s impact on stratospheric chemistry in the Southern Hemisphere. Among their findings: stratospheric water vapor levels several thousand miles from the site of the eruption were as high as 358 parts per million. That was a staggering increase over the typical level of five parts per million.

Intrigued, Vömel began looking at data from radiosondes launched by nations in the region. One radiosonde that had been launched from Fiji into the volcanic plume less than a day after the eruption found water vapor levels of more than 1,300 parts per million, and radiosondes over eastern Australia showed levels of 2,900 parts per million.

"This was just absolutely mind-blowing,” Vömel said.
https://news.ucar.edu/132867/volcanic-eruption-dramatically-increased-water-vapor-stratosphere

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