The unidentified eruption of 1809: a climatic cold case ...

The “1809 eruption” is one of the most recent unidentified volcanic eruptions with a global climate impact. Even though the eruption ranks as the third largest since 1500 with a sulfur emission strength estimated to be 2 times that of the 1991 eruption of Pinatubo, not much is known of it from histo...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Timmreck, Claudia, Toohey, Matthew, Zanchettin, Davide, Brönnimann, Stefan, Lundstad, Elin, Wilson, Rob
Format: Text
Language:unknown
Published: Copernicus Publications 2021
Subjects:
Online Access:https://dx.doi.org/10.48350/157546
https://boris.unibe.ch/157546/
Description
Summary:The “1809 eruption” is one of the most recent unidentified volcanic eruptions with a global climate impact. Even though the eruption ranks as the third largest since 1500 with a sulfur emission strength estimated to be 2 times that of the 1991 eruption of Pinatubo, not much is known of it from historic sources. Based on a compilation of instrumental and reconstructed temperature time series, we show here that tropical temperatures show a significant drop in response to the ∼ 1809 eruption that is similar to that produced by the Mt. Tambora eruption in 1815, while the response of Northern Hemisphere (NH) boreal summer temperature is spatially heterogeneous. We test the sensitivity of the climate response simulated by the MPI Earth system model to a range of volcanic forcing estimates constructed using estimated volcanic stratospheric sulfur injections (VSSIs) and uncertainties from ice-core records. Three of the forcing reconstructions represent a tropical eruption with an approximately symmetric hemispheric ...