Stratospheric aerosols are an important component of the climate system. Most noticeable those effects are after volcanic eruptions when SO2 injected with the eruption reaches the stratosphere, oxidizes and forms stratospheric aerosol. There have been several studies, where a volcanic eruption plume and the associated radiative forcing were analyzed using climate models. Besides, volcanic eruptions were studied using the data from satellite measurements; however, studies combining both models and measurement data are rare. In this paper, we compared changes in the stratospheric aerosol loading after the 2018 Ambae eruption observed by satellite remote sensing measurements and by a global aerosol model. The measurement results were compared with the model output from ECHAM5-HAM. In order to simulate the eruption accurately, we use SO2 injections estimates from OMPS and OMI for the first phase of eruption and TROPOMI for the second phase. Generally, the agreement between the vertical and geographical distribution of the aerosol extinction coefficient from OMPS-LP and ECHAM is quite remarkable, in particular, for the second phase.
The data contain the ECHAM5-HAM data used for this project.