The eruption of Hawaii's Mauna Loa volcano has temporarily knocked off power to the world’s premier station that measures heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but officials Wednesday say it won’t be a problem.
“This is sort of our flagship station,” said Colm Sweeney, the monitoring lab’s associate director. “The scientific value of Mauna Loa is really in what it stands for. It also is one of the cleanest signals that we have.”
That’s because it’s on a mountain away from heavy populations and vegetation and is so high that it is like “poking your finger up in the atmosphere” to measure levels in the troposphere without contamination from local activity, said Ariel Stein, the monitoring lab’s director. There are more than 300 stations worldwide, including more than 70 operated by NOAA, so the global measurement of greenhouse gases will continue, Sweeney said.
During the 1984 Mauna Loa eruption the station was knocked out for 36 days but the global monitoring continued and long-term records are still complete, Sweeney said. Sweeney and Stein said it’s unlikely that this Mauna Loa eruption will change global temperatures much, unlike 1991’s eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. Massive eruptions like Pinatubo can put enough sulfate aerosols high into the upper atmosphere that reflect sunlight and cool global temperatures temporarily.
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