Detection of Air Temperature and Wind Changes Synchronized With the Lamb Wave From the 2022 Tonga Volcanic Eruption.

The explosive 2022 Tonga submarine volcanic eruption produced a globally propagated atmospheric disturbance. A leading Lamb wave pulse was recorded as a pressure pulse worldwide. A weather‐station network in Japan recorded the pressure pulse together with temperature and wind conditions during the passage of the pulse. Individual temperature and wind records indicate little simultaneous change. However, after alignment of records at the time of pressure pulse arrivals and stacking, clear temperature and wind changes synchronized with the pressure change are evident. Assuming Lamb wave propagation, the synthesized temperature and wind changes from the pressure record show a good match with the observed waveforms. The observed wind speed and pressure change of the Lamb pulse yielded a total energy transported by the pulse of 4.2 × 1016 J. Plain Language Summary: Atmospheric disturbance caused by the violent 2022 Tonga volcanic eruption was recorded by multiple types of sensors on the ground. The leading pressure signals, of about 20 min duration and about 2 hPa amplitude, were observed in a nationwide weather network in Japan as an anomaly that stands out from the background atmospheric pressure trend. Other meteorological sensors such as temperature and wind components were also in operation, but expected changes are on the order of 0.15 K and 0.5 m/s over the 20 min signal duration, too small to be detected in individual records. Using a pressure signal as a time mark for data alignment, we averaged all temperature and wind components parallel to the direction from Tonga toward Japan recorded by the network. Such averaging steps greatly reduced the spatially incoherent background noise and enhanced the signals coherent with the arrival of the pressure pulse. The resultant temperature and wind changes are comparable to the theoretically predicted ones. The measured temporal changes of atmospheric pressure and air flow enable direct estimation of the energy flow transported by the pressure pulse. The estimated total energy transported by the pressure pulse is between (3.8–4.6) × $\times $ 1016 J. Key Points: Stacking nationwide weather network records reveals temporal changes in temperature and wind flow synchronized with the Lamb pressure pulseObserved temporal variations are close to the adiabatic air compression and Lamb wave flow models expected from the pressure pulseAnalysis of observed wind speed and pressure changes reveals that the total energy transported by the Lamb pulse was 4.2 × 1016 J [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]