Weather Effects From Eruption

[MarkP]

It seems that since the eruption it has been uniformly gray and drizzly in Eden Roc. Now this is by no means unheard of for Eden Roc so it could be just one of those phases but it is more common for it to rain half the time and have broken sun the other half. I was just wondering first if others are experiencing pronounced grayness and second if there is any actual scientific basis for it that anyone can refer to. We are not getting hammered by VOG so we are not directly downwind in the typical sense. However upper level winds are often from a different direction. If we were talking about ash from a phreatic eruption that was blasted to 30,000' then all bets are off but we tend to have an inversion layer at around 7,000' that normal convection can't punch through so I would expect the ground sourced heat, moisture, and particulate nuclei to follow the traditional lower level wind patterns that the everyday VOG does.

[Rob Tucker]

Yep. In Pahoa we are getting near constant rain or drizzle. The plume is hovering at altitude and condensate is falling. Lots of mud, some Pele's hair but the air is good. It is costing me money. I am buying truckloads of gravel to deal with the constant wet/mud.

[leilanidude]

All that heat rising from the lava
combined with a large loss of the rainforest is definitely causing weather patterns to change.

[Jeremy Lutes]

I'll just leave this here:

https://img.purch.com/h/1400/aHR0cDovL3d...RhdGUuanBn

Very wet in Pahoa Village these days, with a notable decrease in solar insolation as well. Usually, this close to the solstice, we'd collect ~10KWh of power on a partly cloudy day. Some of these recent dark days we've seen less than 1KWh.

edited to add: Above photo found on this page:
https://www.space.com/40637-hawaii-kilau...hotos.html

[jrw]

I have live in Eden Roc for 7 years I have not notice in change in the weather it seems to me the air quality has been better then normal. We have always got a few days a year with vog a lot worse then we had had since the eruption.

jrw

[TomK]

Thank you, Jeremy, especially for the first link. Steam and water vapor from the ocean entry is being sent up to around 10,000 feet at the moment and local winds (or lack of them) are driving that moisture over the area between Kapoho and Pahoa. It's high enough to form rain and unless there's a change in the wind or lava flow it'll continue. Nothing at all to do with the loss of rainforest.

I'd be interested to learn how acidic the rainfall is in Pahoa right now; I assume it's higher than normal.

[MarkP]

These pictures certainly document plumes from the ocean entry and from the eruption in general blowing westward over the rest of Puna. However that is not the normal wind direction. Several other photos and simulations show clouds, ash, and SO2 being blown more directly southwards. The website showing plumes of SO2 from Halemaumau in the past often showed the plumes angling off shore at least initially. My point is that at least part of what we are experiencing now is due to winds out of the east more than they usually do.

It seems strange that an area would get the moisture from the eruption but not the SO2.

[ironyak]

NWS talked about this yesterday - combo of pyrocumulus and ocean entry moisture apparently:
http://www.bigislandvideonews.com/2018/0...a-weather/

[MarkP]

That all makes sense although I recall a website that showed direction and intensity of vog plumes from Halemaumau and Puuoo. Can't remember where it is now. Anyway it seemed to show the plumes with enough south in them that they often angled offshore.

I acknowledge a strain of rationalization in my arguments. I'm eager for this not to be the normal wind direction but given typical trades the plume would at best cruise down along the coast,screwing somebody else over.

[TomK]

Tradewinds are light right now, onshore and offshore winds (depending on the time of day) are dominating at low levels, especially when there is interaction with the ground.