RADIO PHYSICS AND RADIO ASTRONOMY

Subject and Purpose. The January 15, 2022 explosion of the Tonga volcano, unique in its power, led to significant disturbances of the Earth’s subsystems, including the lithosphere and the World Ocean — atmosphere — ionosphere — magnetosphere system, plus the geophysical fields like the baric, the electric and the magnetic. A task of great importance is a detailed study of disturbances in all the subsystems and of the fields involved, in particular, a further study of geomagnetic field component variations (and such of their derivatives) that appear to be generated in the near-field zone by the unique explosion of January 15, 2022.

Methods and Methodology. To analyze temporal variations of the geomagnetic field, data records of its three spatial components have been used, specifically of the X, Y, and Z, and of their time derivatives Ẋ, Ẏ, and Ż , as recorded at geomagnetic observatories (stations) of the INTERMAGNET network during the explosion. The measurement error never exceeded 0.1 nT. The time resolution was 1 min. The records obtained on the quieter days of January 13, 2022 and January 17, 2022 have been chosen as reference data.

Results. Some specific features have been identified of the near-field geomagnetic effects that accompanied the powerful explosion of the Tonga volcano. The activity led to generation of an aperiodic "bay-shaped" disturbance and a number of quasi-periodic magnetic disturbances. The "bay-shaped" synchronous disturbances in the field  components X-, Y- and Z- measured at the West Samoa API station as 15 nT, 28 nT, and –13 nT, respectively, and lasted for 120 to 146 min. Their generation mechanism is associated with the formation of an ionospheric "hole" under the action of a blast wave. The time delay of the "bay-shaped" disturbances was close to 16 min. Among the quasiperiodic disturbances, the earlier ones observed at the API station demonstrated a 6 min delay time, being caused by an acoustic resonance of a 4.4 min period and a 2 nT amplitude in the field of a standing wave. In addition to the resonant oscillations, other groups of quasi-periodic disturbances were also observed, whose delay times increased gradually from 8.5 to 75 min. The apparent horizontal velocities in their case were 4.0, 1.5, 1.0, 0.5, 0.31, and 0.2 km/s. Such velocities corresponded to slow magnetohydrodynamic waves, blast waves, atmospheric gravity waves, Lamb’s wave or a tsunami. At greater separations from the volcano, the time delays of disturbances in each of those groups demonstrated a trend toward increasing, which suggests a volcanic origin of the magnetic disturbances under discussion.

Conclusions. The geomagnetic field disturbances observed in the near-field zone (up to 103 km from the volcano) differed qualitatively and quantitatively from the disturbances at larger separations (3 to 5)·103 km

Keywords: TTonga volcano, near-field zone, geomagnetic field, bay-like disturbance, quasi-stationary disturbance, time delay, apparent velocity, disturbance mechanism

Manuscript submitted 26.01.2023

Radio phys. radio astron. 2026, 31(1): 011-025

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