The underwater Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha-apai volcano erupted in the early hours of 15th January 2022, and injected volcanic gases and aerosols to over 50 km altitude. Here we synthesise satellite, ground-based, in situ and radiosonde observations of the eruption to investigate the strength of the stratospheric aerosol and water vapour perturbations in the initial weeks after the eruption and we quantify the net radiative impact across the two species using offline radiative transfer modelling. We find that the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha-apai eruption produced the largest global perturbation of stratospheric aerosols since the Pinatubo eruption in 1991 and the largest perturbation of stratospheric water vapour observed in the satellite era. Immediately after the eruption, water vapour radiative cooling dominated the local stratospheric heating/cooling rates, while at the top-of-the-atmosphere and surface, volcanic aerosol cooling dominated the radiative forcing. However, after two weeks, due to dispersion/dilution, water vapour heating started to dominate the top-of-the-atmosphere radiative forcing, leading to a net warming of the climate system.

We use a combination of spaceborne instruments to study the unprecedented stratospheric plume after the Tonga eruption of 15 January 2022. The aerosol plume was initially formed of two clouds at 30 and 28 km, mostly composed of submicron-sized sulfate particles, without ash, which is washed out within the first day following the eruption. The large amount of injected water vapour led to a fast conversion of SO₂ to sulfate aerosols and induced a descent of the plume to 24–26 km over the first 3 weeks by radiative cooling. Whereas SO₂ returned to background levels by the end of January, volcanic sulfates and water still persisted after 6 months, mainly confined between 35^∘ S and 20^∘ N until June due to the zonal symmetry of the summer stratospheric circulation at 22–26 km. Sulfate particles, undergoing hygroscopic growth and coagulation, sediment and gradually separate from the moisture anomaly entrained in the ascending branch Brewer–Dobson circulation. Sulfate aerosol optical depths derived from the IASI (Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer) infrared sounder show that during the first 2 months, the aerosol plume was not simply diluted and dispersed passively but rather organized in concentrated patches. Space-borne lidar winds suggest that those structures, generated by shear-induced instabilities, are associated with vorticity anomalies that may have enhanced the duration and impact of the plume.

The eruption of the submarine Hunga volcano in January 2022 was associated with a powerful blast that injected volcanic material to altitudes up to 58 km. From a combination of various types of satellite and ground-based observations supported by transport modeling, we show evidence for an unprecedented increase in the global stratospheric water mass by 13% relative to climatological levels, and a 5-fold increase of stratospheric aerosol load, the highest in the last three decades. Owing to the extreme injection altitude, the volcanic plume circumnavigated the Earth in only 1 week and dispersed nearly pole-to-pole in three months. The unique nature and magnitude of the global stratospheric perturbation by the Hunga eruption ranks it among the most remarkable climatic events in the modern observation era, with a range of potential long-lasting repercussions for stratospheric composition and climate.

Wave‐induced Lagrangian fluctuations of temperature and vertical velocity in the lower stratosphere are quantified using measurements from superpressure balloons (SPBs). Observations recorded every minute along SPB flights allow the whole gravity wave spectrum to be described and provide unprecedented information on both the intrinsic frequency spectrum and the probability distribution function of wave fluctuations. The data set has been collected during two campaigns coordinated by the French Space Agency in 2010, involving 19 balloons over Antarctica and 3 in the deep tropics. In both regions, the vertical velocity distributions depart significantly from a Gaussian behavior. Knowledge on such wave fluctuations is essential for modeling microphysical processes along Lagrangian trajectories. We propose a new simple parameterization that reproduces both the non‐Gaussian distribution of vertical velocities (or heating/cooling rates) and their observed intrinsic frequency spectrum.

The accuracy of horizontal winds and temperature in the equatorial lower stratosphere is evaluated in different (re)analyses (European Centre for Medium‐Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) operational analysis, ERA Interim, and Modern‐Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications) using an independent data set collected at low latitudes during long‐duration balloon flights in early 2010. The three analyzed wind products are found significantly less accurate than in the extratropics, with periods of disagreement with the observations lasting several days. To highlight the dynamical context in which the major disagreement events occur, case studies are carried out. The events are shown to be related to an improper representation of large‐scale equatorial Kelvin and Yanai wave packets with vertical wavelengths smaller than 5 km. Such events can induce large errors on trajectories computed with analyzed winds relatively to the actual (balloon) trajectory: 4000 km separation after 5 days of calculation. Reasons for analyses inaccuracy are discussed. The vertical resolution of the underlying model likely plays a role, but the main factor responsible for deficiencies appears to be the lack of wind observations. Indeed, errors in analyzed winds during the campaign have a strong longitudinal structure, with root‐mean‐square errors twice as large over the Indian Ocean and western Pacific, poorly covered by radiosounding stations, as over the Maritime Continent or South America. For the ECMWF analysis, this structure mirrors that of the analysis increments, which have largest amplitudes over observed regions. We argue that the reported events are more likely to happen during maximum shear phases of the quasi‐biennial oscillation.

The impact of high-frequency fluctuations of temperature on homogeneous nucleation of ice crystals in the vicinity of the tropical tropopause is investigated using a bin microphysics scheme for air parcels. The imposed temperature fluctuations come from measurements during isopycnic balloon flights near the tropical tropopause. The balloons collected data at high frequency, guaranteeing that gravity wave signals are well resolved.With the observed temperature time series, the numerical simulations with homogeneous freezing show a full range of ice number concentration (INC) as previously observed in the tropical upper troposphere. In particular, a low INC may be obtained if the gravity wave perturbations produce a non-persistent cooling rate (even with large magnitude) such that the absolute change in temperature remains small during nucleation. This result is explained analytically by a dependence of the INC on the absolute drop in temperature (and not on the cooling rate). This work suggests that homogeneous ice nucleation is not necessarily inconsistent with observations of low INCs.