Atmospheric pressure waves from Volcano detected by Tempests (Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai)

I did not know about this, and precedes a possible tidal wave.
My barometer picked up the atmospheric pressure wave from the Tonga volcano. I had thought it was just a passing CuNim which obscured a good cloud timelapse at that time but using the Tempest map I could look up the coast to see exactly when the max high pressure spike flowed past other stations.

and up the coast random Tempest stations:

And another half hour to reach Tasmania:

And it took just over one hour to travel the length of New Zealand (clocks are 2 hours ahead to Australia:
Top of the North island:

To bottom of South island:

Might be valuable data for something?
cheers Ian :slight_smile:


Seen the satellite pictures this explosion was ‘major’ ?? Guess air compression like when a bomb explodes and this waves out in all directions. What is surprising me it is going that far … guess we all can look at our pressure readings and see if it goes really global.


I am guessing it will dampen/weaken until it becomes almost imperceptible. The waves from a “global tsunami” e.g. like the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, do travel very far. But, by the time the 2004 tsunami hit the east coast of the US, it was measured in inches rather than feet (or meters :slight_smile: ). Our local NWS office had a meteorologist who was doing a tsunami study, and he was pretty excited about it, but, almost nobody outside of the office even noticed :slight_smile: .

I would expect the atmospheric perturbations to behave similarly.

at some point in time I might build myself an infrasound detector (0.003 Hz to 20 Hz). Should be capable of measuring the direction from which the super low frequency sound is coming from. Apparently it can detect things like volcanic eruptions thousands kilometers away. Do I have any use for it. No, but I think it might be cool.

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this a all pre made solution, it is just expensive

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but why is it so expensive? is the microbarometer itself that expensive? I didn’t look into this yet. do you know which sensor they are using?
Edit, a 16 bit pressure sensor costs around 11 euro. A couple of those sufficiently spread out, should be a good start.
Infra sound amplitudes are between 0.001 Pa and 100 Pa, compared to the normal atmospheric pressure of 10000 Pa. 16 bit gives a max resolution of 0.15 Pa. So a sensor with more than 16 bit would be great. Or some differential pressure sensor, that could measure the pressure difference between 2 points, in which 16 bit would be perfect.

No idea but over time I saw prices go up and up and less and less information about used components …

This was my station at 6:20 am this morning when the pressure wave went through.

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It’s just passed my weather station in the UK

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I was surprised to see this (from a friend near Poughkeepsie, NY) …

On the other hand, the perturbation reportedly (at least in one report I read) traveled at 800mph, so, maybe it did not dampen as quickly as I expected.

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My barometer just to the west of Poughkeepsie, NY looks like a roller coaster ride today, probably due to the departing coastal storm, incoming arctic blast, and looming winter storm for tomorrow evening…

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is this the same thing measured in the Netherlands?

How fast does it travel?

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South of France

more detailed

and even more details


if it travels with the speed of sound it should be 51 minutes later in Toulouse compared to Groningen.

see where the dips begin, not far off I think …

Rob shared this

that’s cool, can we have one for the tempest stations across the world?

I asked but not sure our technical guru’s are on duty … impressive nevertheless

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well, I’m no going to click on every station on the map in Europe just to get the data.

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we should get two pulses at least I guess. Tonga is 16.000 km from groningen, but measured the other way around it is 24000.