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Reply to: Rainfall an unlikely factor in Kīlauea’s 2018 rift eruption

Nature volume 602, pages E11–E14 (2022)Cite this article

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The Original Article was published on 02 February 2022

replying to M. P. Poland et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2172-5 (2022)

In the accompanying Comment1, Poland et al. use rain gauge data to argue that, in contrast to the conclusion in our previously published paper2, rainfall in the months leading up to the eruption was not anomalously high and that the eruption occurred in response to substantial magma pressurization. We demonstrate below that rain gauge data do in fact show anomalously high precipitation. Poland et al. miss this signal by looking only at the gauges furthest from the rift and by not accounting for the underlying distribution of the data. While we agree that there was precursory summit displacement (as we state in our Author Correction3) that prompted the U.S. Geological Survey to issue a Volcanic Activity Notice on 17 April, this does not necessarily suggest wholesale pressurization of the volcanic system. We show below that summit displacement was much less than before previous intrusions. Pressurization—however defined—does not preclude an external eruption trigger: eruptions are referred to as triggered4,5,6,7 if they are precipitated by an external force regardless of whether pre-eruptive magma pressurization is evident8.

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Fig. 1: Pre-eruptive rainfall data.
Fig. 2: Precursory ground deformation at Kīlauea.

Data availability

All data are open source. Satellite-derived rainfall data (TRMM and GPM satellite data) are available from the NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) EarthData Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center portal (https://doi.org/10.5067/TRMM/TMPA/3H/7). Rainfall gauge data are available from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Information climate data portal (https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/datasets/GHCND/stations/GHCND:USC00511303/detail). GPS data are available from the Nevada Geodetic Laboratory (http://geodesy.unr.edu/NGLStationPages/stations/). Sentinel-1 ascending- and descending-track SAR acquisitions were obtained through UNAVCO’s Seamless SAR Archive (https://doi.org/10.5194/isprsarchives-XL-1-65-2014). Derived time series products of Kīlauea are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3944709 and https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3957859.

Code availability

Code required for data access, analysis and display is available, in Jupyter Notebook format, at https://github.com/jifarquharson/Farquharson_Amelung_2020_Kilauea-Nature/blob/master/Farquharson_Amelung_Kilauea_Supplemental_2.ipynb (Fig. 1) and https://github.com/jifarquharson/Farquharson_Amelung_2020_Kilauea-Nature/blob/master/Farquharson_Amelung_Kilauea_Supplemental_1.ipynb (Fig. 2).

References

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Acknowledgements

Copernicus Sentinel-1 and Cosmo-Skymed SAR data are available thanks to the Group on Earth Observation’s Geohazard Supersites and Natural Laboratory Initiative. This work was supported by funding from NASA’s Interdisciplinary Research in Earth Science programme (grant number 80NSSC17K0028 P00003). Data processing was conducted using Stampede2 at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, supported by National Science Foundation grant number ACI-1548562, using the public domain InSAR Scientific Computing Environment software of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. We thank B. Varugu for discussions.

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  1. Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, University of Miami, Miami, FL, USA

    Jamie I. Farquharson & Falk Amelung

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  1. Jamie I. Farquharson
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Contributions

J.I.F. processed the GPS and rainfall data, and plotted all data. F.A. processed the InSAR data. Both authors contributed to the writing.

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Correspondence to Jamie I. Farquharson.

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Competing interests

This work was supported by funding from NASA’s Interdisciplinary Research in Earth Science programme (grant number 80NSSC17K0028 P00003) exploring the influence of rainfall in triggering volcanism.

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Farquharson, J.I., Amelung, F. Reply to: Rainfall an unlikely factor in Kīlauea’s 2018 rift eruption. Nature 602, E11–E14 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04164-0

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