New insights into the relationship between mass eruption rate and volcanic column height based on the IVESPA dataset

Relating the mass eruption rate (MER) of explosive eruptions to column height in the atmosphere is key to reconstructing past eruptions and forecasting volcanic hazards. Using 134 eruptive events from the Independent Volcanic Eruption Source Parameter Archive (IVESPA v1.0), we explore the canonical MER-height relationship for four measures of column height: spreading level, sulfur dioxide height, and top height from both directly observed plumes and those reconstructed from deposits. These relationships show significant differences and should be chosen carefully for operational and research applications. The roles of atmospheric stratification, wind, and humidity remain challenging to assess across the large range of eruptive conditions in this database, ultimately resulting in empirical relationships outperforming analytical models that account for atmospheric conditions. This finding reveals the complexity of the height-MER relation that is difficult to constrain based on available heterogeneous observations, which reinforces the need for improved datasets to develop eruptive column models.