Flash flooding in East Tennessee

It doesn't get any more blue in NC than Asheville.

Some reasonable speculation that the Hunga Tonga eruption in 2022 has something to do with some hot and wet summers around the world. CO2 is a weak green house gas. On the other hand, water vapor is number one on the green house gas list.

https://research.noaa.gov/2023/12/20/hunga-tonga-2022-eruption/

The eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano on January 15, 2022, produced the largest underwater explosion ever recorded by modern scientific instruments, blasting an enormous amount of water and volcanic gases higher than any other eruption in the satellite era.

Two research papers have now detailed how that water vapor rapidly affected the Earth’s stratosphere between 10 and 31 miles above the surface, causing an unexpectedly large loss of ozone and an unexpectedly rapid formation of aerosols. 

“Up until now, sulfur has been the primary focus of research on eruptions,”  said Elizabeth Asher, a CIRES research scientist now working at NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory. Asher led one of the two recent studies while at the NOAA’s Chemical Sciences Laboratory. “Studying Hunga Tonga showed that other gases, like water vapor, can have a profound impact on these outcomes.” 

Hunga Tonga offered a unique opportunity to observe the immediate atmospheric impacts of a massive volcanic eruption. When news broke of the eruption, Karen Rosenlof, a senior climate scientist at the Chemical Sciences Laboratory, immediately contacted colleagues on the island of La Réunion, which sits in the Indian Ocean 8,000 miles away from Hunga-Tonga but lay directly in the path of the dispersing eruptive plume. Only days later, Asher and several colleagues from CIRES, the University of Houston, and St. Edward’s University were on flights bound for La Réunion carrying miniaturized atmospheric instruments in their baggage.

The rapid deployment of balloon-borne observations at Réunion Island confirmed the unprecedented amount of water vapor – an estimated 150 million tons – that was injected into the stratosphere by the eruption. The balloon payloads also carried instruments to measure ozone and sulfur dioxide, in addition to carrying a POPS (portable optical particle spectrometer) particle instrument to determine the abundance of injected aerosol, which was used to calculate the rate at which new aerosol particles were formed downwind of the volcano.

The big earthquake in Turkey was right after they said they wouldn’t engage in any Ukraine fuckery and Erdogan being Erdogan.