Lightning and electrical activity during the eruption of Mt. Augustine

Lightning during several of the eruptions were observed using a technique that we use to observe thunderstorms. Very high frequency radio emissions (60 MHz) emitted by electrical discharges are located by their times of arrival at several receiving stations. In a typical thunderstorm lightning flash we locate several thousand events giving a 3-D map of the lightning. In mid January we set up two stations about 100 km east of the volcano, near Homer, AK. We received and located the source of thousands of radio emissions from the vicinity of Mt Augustine during the January 28 eruption. With two stations we were able to determine the azimuthal direction to the sources, their power, the time history and relationship to other pulses. On one lightning flash we used an interferometric effect to infer altitude. We observed two distinct forms of electrical activity. The first was many short bursts (less than a milliseconds) that occurred coincident with the explosive eruption. These seemed to be short discharges (up to several hundred meters) that occur just as the material leaves the volcano. The other type was very similar to the lightning that we see in thunderstorms. Most of these lightning flashes began several minutes after the explosive eruption began. Following the largest eruption on January 28 we observed about 300 discharges in a period lasting 11 minutes. Initially these flashes lasted only a few milliseconds, but the final ones lasted more than one half second, had many branches 10's of km in length. Most or all of this lightning was in the plume. Because of the bad weather there were no visual observations. Previous detection of volcanic lightning has been visually or by low frequency radio emissions that detect only the lightning that comes to the ground. These initial observations show that this technique has great potential to detect explosive eruptions and study the details of lightning and the charge structure in the plume.