An interesting plot:
For everyone out there who's arguing that the Hunga Tonga volcanic eruption added a lot of water vapor to the atmosphere, here's a plot of total atmospheric water vapor (60N-60S). I've removed the dates on the x-axis, so please tell me when the eruption occurred.
I deleted my response. Not being able to answer your question, I looked at a number of sources to see if I could find an answer. Failing that, I quoted some stats on the volcano. Now I'm embarrassed because the eminent Professor Katherine Hayhoe ticked me off. 😒
It tells you something about social media when a Canadian automatically assumes someone else is a bad-faith troll. On Twitter, she would have almost certainly been right.
here's the answer, with HT's eruption marked as the dotted line. as you can see, it injected a trivial amount of water vapor into the atmosphere. it was unusual only in that it injected it into the mid-stratosphere, but water vapor there has little impact on the climate.
Absolutely — it had a big impact on the stratosphere. The right calculation of course is to take the change at each level and multiply it by a radiative kernel that weights the level by it's climate impact. That yields a very small impact on the climate from HT's water vapor impact.
