The debate about including data from the February 2022 flood event (Letters, 15 May) is missing an essential factor for consideration. The question is whether the unprecedented flood event was part of the variation due to climate change or was it due to another equally unprecedented event.
None of the commentary on this issue that I’ve read in The Echo has considered the known fact that the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apa submarine volcano erupted in the South Pacific, 3,000km east of Townsville, six weeks before the February 2022 flood event.
This eruption ejected an estimated 146 million tonnes of super-heated water vapour into the stratosphere, according to a study published in Geophysical Research Letters. This humongous amount of water vapour rapidly dispersed in the near vacuum of the stratosphere and took several weeks to fall back to earth.
As the water ejected by the Hunga Tonga eruption returned to earth, it significantly augmented normal rainfall patterns all across the southern hemisphere, in Australia and New Zealand, Southern Africa and South America. Given these facts, Byron Council is probably wise to exclude the February 2022 flood data from future rainfall predictions and flood planning.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
