Abstract
Multiple passages of the atmospheric (Lamb) waves were recorded globally after the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai (HTHH) volcanic eruption on 15 January 2022. The waves perturbed the ionosphere and produced traveling ionospheric disturbances (TIDs) that were observed from the ground network of Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers. This study presents new observations of TIDs at higher altitudes (>550 km) from CubeSat GPS tracking data. The satellite sampling along many CubeSat orbits enable to map broader spatio-temporal patterns of the TID propagation compared to ground receivers. Due to the larger spatial coverage over a shorter period of time, the CubeSat measurements provide complementary information to stationary ground receivers. We found that the amplitude of the HTHH-induced ionospheric perturbations at high altitudes (>550 km) are as large as 10 TECU (1 TECU = 1016 electrons/m2) in slant total electron content between CubeSats and GPS satellites. The TIDs traveled along with the Lamb waves and were recorded by CubeSats above India 12 hr after the eruption and at the antipode of the eruption 16 hr after. These suggest that the ionospheric disturbances reached to the high altitudes and traveled globally as a speed of ∼350 m/s. The TIDs were also detected by CubeSats above the Australian continent several hours before the (conventional) tsunami made landfall on the Australian coasts. We discuss a new opportunity to study the upper ionosphere and its coupling with the solid Earth and to develop advanced monitoring systems of geohazards by the advent of low-cost small satellite technology.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | e2022EA002586 |
| Journal | Earth and Space Science |
| Volume | 10 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Apr 2023 |
Funding
This work was funded by The University of Newcastle, Australian Research Council (DP160104095 and DP170100224), and in part by NASA's GRACE Follow‐On science team project. We thank two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading and constructive comments which greatly improved the original manuscript. Of particular, the wave analysis like Figure 9 is indebted to one of the reviewers. LR is supported by French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) under reference ANR‐19‐CE04‐ 0003 and Centre national d’études spatiales (CNES) for APR project UVTECGEOX.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Environmental Science (miscellaneous)
- General Earth and Planetary Sciences
