How do volcanic eruptions affect the weather?

Question

How do volcanic eruptions affect the weather?

Answer 1

Because they spew out 10 times more green house gasses then all the people in the world put together produce in 1 year. That's why it's so hard for me to believe people are the cause of global warming. This kind of stuff goes back and forth all the time. Just 20 years ago scientists were telling eveyone that another ice age was comming. What ever happened to that idea. Thats not to say I don't belive we should clean up our act.

Answer 2

When a volcano erupts, ash and other materials are let out into the atmosphere. These materials create almost like a  layer and block ot sun rays, causing the weather to be cooler. Also there is often a lot of rain, lightning, and thunder during an eruption. This is because all the ash particles that are thrown up into the atmosphere are good at attracting/collecting water droplets. The cause of how the lightning is causedis unknown, but it probably involves the particles moving through the air and separating positively and negatively charged particles.

Hope I helped.  :D

Answer 3

The main effect on weather right near a volcano is that there is often a lot of rain, lightning, and thunder during an eruption. This is because all the ash particles that are thrown up into the atmosphere are good at attracting collecting water droplets. We don't quite know how the lightning is caused but it probably involves the particles moving through the air and separating positively and negatively charged particles.

As for the world-wide affects of volcanic eruptions this only happens when there are large explosive eruptions that throw material into the stratosphere. If it only gets into the troposphere it gets flushed out by rain. The effects on the climate haven't been completely figured out. It seems to depend on the size of the particles (again mostly droplets of sulfuric acid). If they are big then they let sunlight in but don't let heat radiated from the Earth's surface out, and the net result is a warmer Earth (the famous Greenhouse effect). If the particles are smaller than about 2 microns then they block some of the incoming energy from the Sun and the Earth cools off a little. That seems to have been the effect of the Pinatubo eruption where about a 1/2 degree of cooling was noticed around the world. Of course that doesn't just mean that things are cooler, but there are all kinds of effects on the wind circulation and where storms occur, and just about anything else you can think of.

Answer 4

Desert dust, wildfire smoke, and volcanic ash are all aerosols, and their impact on surface and atmospheric temperatures make them an important factor affecting climate. Most aerosols actually cool the planet by blocking sunlight that would otherwise reach Earth’s surface—for example, ash from the volcanic eruptions of El Chichon in 1982 and Mount Pinatubo in 1991 significantly cooled the planet for a year or two.

While volcanic ash in the upper atmosphere can cool the planet by blocking sunlight, dust in the lower atmosphere absorbs sunlight and reradiates it as heat. So pure dust in the air can become a significant component to local atmospheric heating. This is just one more thing we have to think about.

Check out the sites below for the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) instrument which was launched on December 18, 1999, on Terra, the flagship of EOS’s advanced instrument-carrying satellites.

Answer 5

When ash reaches the atmosphere, it blocks it.