Volcanic ash was documented to be over 100 cm deep in areas within 75 km of the eruption, while areas within a 500 km radius saw a 5 cm ash fall, and ash could be found as far away as 1300 km. With this much volcanic ash on the ground, any crops or viable vegetation sources were smothered at a minimum and burned if they were close to the volcano itself. This created an immediate shortage of food in Indonesia, one that only compounded the regular shortage during the winter season (Cole-Dai et al. 2009). The ejection of these gasses, especially HCl, caused the precipitation that followed in the region to be extremely acidic, killing much of the crops that either survived or were rebudding during the spring. The food shortage was compounded by the Napoleonic wars, floods, and cholera.
The estimated volcanic ashfall regions during the 1815 eruption. The red areas show thickness of volcanic ash fall. The outermost region (1 cm (0.39 in) thickness) reached Borneo and Sulawesi.
The presence of ash in the atmosphere for several months after the eruption reflected significant amounts of solar radiation, causing unseasonably cool summers which further drove populations to a food shortage. China, Europe, and North America all had well-documented cases of abnormal temperatures, devastating their harvests. These climatic shifts also altered the monsoon season in China and India, forcing thousands of Chinese to flee coastal areas due to regional flooding of the Yangtze Valley (Granados et al. 2012). The gases also reflected some of the already-decreased incoming solar radiation, causing a notable decrease in global temperatures throughout the decade, between 0.4-0.7 °C globally. It was so dramatic that that an ice dam was formed in Switzerland during the summer of 1816 and 1817, earning 1816 the title "Year without a Summer" or YWAS (Bodenmann et al. 2011).
The winter months of 1816 were not very different from years previous, but the spring and summer maintained the cool-to-freezing temperatures. However, the winter of 1817 radically differed, reaching temperatures below -30 °F in central and northern New York, which were cold enough to freeze lakes and rivers used for transporting supplies. Both Europe and North America suffered late freezes that lasted well into June with snow accumulating up to 32 cm in August, which killed recently planted crops, crippling the food industry. Unseasonably cool temperatures reduced the output of crops worldwide: the growing seasons in parts of Massachusetts and New Hampshire were less than 80 days in 1816, citing freezing temperatures as the reason for harvest failure (Oppenheimer 2003). These were visually connected to unique sunsets observed in western Europe and red fog found on the Eastern Seaboard of the US. These unique atmospheric conditions persisted for the better part of 2.5 years (Robock 2000).
Ice cores have been used to monitor atmospheric gases during the cold decade (1810-1819) and the results are puzzling. The SO4 concentration found in both Siple Station, Antarctica and Central Greenland bounced from 5.0 in January 1816 to 1.1[clarification needed] in August 1818. This means that 25-30 Tg of sulfur was ejected into the atmosphere, most of which would come from Tambora, and was equalized back by natural processes on Earth rather quickly. Another unique factor is that Tambora represents the largest shift in sulfur concentration in the ice cores for the past 5000 years, potentially becoming the single most disruptive event in recorded history. Estimates of the sulfur yield vary from 10 Tg (Black et al. 2012) to 120 Tg (Stothers 2000).
The difference between the models are drastic, but many estimates will either average in or agree on a number between 25-30 Tg. The high concentration might explain the stratospheric warming of ~15 °C, resulting in surface cooling that would be a delayed reaction lasting for the next nine years. It is estimated that the stratospheric warming event only lasted four years, but cooler temperatures were documented until 1825 (Cole-Dai et al. 2009). The data presented did not state whether it was a statistically significant difference or just temperatures cooler than "normal." This has been dubbed a "volcanic winter", similar to a nuclear winter, due to the overall decrease and abysmal farming conditions.
Climate data have shown that the variance between daily lows and highs may have played a role in the lower average temperature because the fluctuations were much more subdued. Generally, the mornings were warmer due to nightly cloud cover and the evenings were cooler because the clouds had dissipated. There were documented fluctuations of cloud cover for various locations that suggested it was a nightly occurrence and the sun killed them off, much like a fog[10] The class boundaries between 1810-1830 without volcanically perturbed years was ~7.9 °C. This is contrasted by the volcanically perturbed years (1815-1817) where the delta was only ~2.3 °C. This meant that the mean annual cycle in 1816 was more linear than bell shaped and 1817 endured cooling across the board. Southeastern England, northern France, and the Netherlands experienced the greatest amount of cooling in Europe; complemented by New York, New Hampshire, Delaware, and Rhode Island in North America (Bodenmann et al. 2011).
Current topography of Sumbawa
The documented rainfall was as much as 80 percent more than the calculated normal with regards to 1816, unusually high amounts of snow were found in Switzerland, France, Germany, and Poland. This is again contrasted by the unusually low precipitations in 1818 which caused droughts throughout most of Europe and Asia (Auchmann et al. 2012). Russia had already experienced unseasonably warm and dry summers since 1815 and this continued for the next three years. There are also documented reductions in ocean temperature near the Baltic Sea, North Sea, and Mediterranean. This seems to have been an indicator of shifted oceanic circulation patterns and possibly changed wind direction and speed (Meronen et al. 2012).
This is further supported by the recorded observations of a British fleet sent to explore the Arctic Circle; they found large ice sheets miles off the coast of Greenland, where two years prior they had been shoved along the east coast of Greenland. Contemporary scientists attributed the Year Without a Summer to the drifting polar ice sheets rather than the eruption of Tambora because of its proximity to England.
Taking into account the Dalton Minimum, and the presence of famine and droughts predating the eruption, the Tambora volcanic event accelerated or exacerbated the extreme climate conditions of 1815. While other eruptions and other climatological events would have led to a global cooling of about 0.2 °C, Tambora increased that number substantially.
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