By Steven Goddard
As reported on WUWT, The UK Met Office is taking a lot of heat for airline financial loses, caused by no flight rules during the Icelandic volcanic eruption. Many readers have expressed their agreement with those criticisms.
I don’t agree with all of these criticisms, and here is why.
Suppose you are taking a ten hour 8:30 PM flight from Seattle to London. You pass Iceland eight hours into the flight, and ash conditions may have changed dramatically since you left. A new volcanic eruption may have occurred overnight, and your plane is almost out of fuel. No matter how accurate the circulation models are, they can not predict the behaviour of the volcano. The modelers and the people in charge of decision making have to be conservative.
Do you want to be on a plane over the frigid waters of the North Atlantic, which can’t progress forward and does not have enough fuel to turn back? I know I don’t. Erupting volcanoes can change in the blink of an eye, as people near Seattle found out at 8:32 AM on May 18, 1980. There is always going to be some risk, but this particular volcano has been spewing out a lot of ash and deserves particular caution.
Now that enough information has been gathered, the decision has been made to restore the flight schedules. It has been a very long week for travelers, but in terms of the required science and engineering – seven days isn’t very long when making life or death decisions.
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Are you claiming that they were able to accurately predict or ascertain the location of the ash plume?
Are you trying to destroy your credibility?
Produce any statements which indicate anyone on this thread claimed that GPS systems on planes aren’t accurate.
It certainly wasn’t me. I’ve used GPS to drop mines into precise locations from aircraft.
The Met Office most certainly made decisions regarding the type of information that they would disseminate – the wrong decisions.
wobble (12:49:01) :
I am still waiting to anyone to produce any evidence that The Met Office did anything wrong. Nothing but a completely irrational dislike of computer models and government.
-f is how you search in a browser page. Perhaps you should try using it before commenting.
D. Patterson (11:08:57) :
And what exactly did I “misrepresent?”
There has been no shortage of misrepresentation in this discussion – everything from the Met Office techniques, to their responsibilities, to the accuracy of their models.
All modern weather forecasting depends on computer models, and the safety flying depends on both the models and the government bodies which make the decisions.
Here is a video of the BA in-flight GPS system. It is very accurate. I have watched the plane circle in a holding pattern around London and it is always oriented in the correct position and direction.
Sounds like a joke to me.
Ian W (04:02:26)
Similarly, there is ALWAYS volcanic ash in the air most of the time at extremely small concentrations. And I understand that in small quantities it can actually be beneficial and clean the turbine blades.
That was interesting information on thunderstorms, but as for the decision to the favour public safety, that to me is a no-brainer.
From a flight planning point of view there is little difference between severe convective weather and volcanic ash. I would say that the volcanic ash boundary is diffuse and uncertain, but if the problem of ash is encountered in-flight, where the aim is land safely, yes, but pre-flight, where thousands of lives are at risk, no.
wobble (20:23:46) :(and all your other, sometimes reasonable, comments).
=======
It was fun, but, “a little knowledge can be dangerous”.
I know from experience, how about you.
Ian W:
Excellent comment.
stevengoddard:
How much ash fell on Heathrow, Paris, Brussels, etc? (Honest question, BTW)
As it happens, just over a year ago, I got scrambled out of Anchorage due to the Mt. Redoubt eruption. Anchorage was closed for the better part of a week, and some north pacific air routes were closed.
There is a difference here, though. When it was possible to fly, the airlines flew: unless the ash was in fact in the area and falling on the ground (my house got a dusting while I was gone), they made their own operational decisions about whether to launch.
This hits the problem right on the head. It isn’t the Met Office’s business to know about how volcanic ash affects jet engines. It is the Met Office’s to give a density gradient map of the ash for the people who’s job it is to make operational decisions based upon meteorological information.
The intelligent way to do this would have been to quickly re-open the airspace, and let airlines make operational decisions based upon how much they are willing to tolerate accelerated maintenance costs.
Also, you really do need to re-do the post’s illustration. Very few airports have great circle routes passing over iceland. In the US, all airfields east and south of DTW do not get close.
Keith Sketchley:
Excellent comment.
My point above. Absent an idiots notion of risk management, that is precisely what should have happened.
precisely the A447 flight RIo-Paris had not loaded enough fuel to divert from its route when it should have avoided the turbulences. Nowaydays Airlines Companies economise on every possible bit, a heavy plane, fully fuel loaded, means more fuel expenses to keep the plane at its maximum speed
Hey Skipper (18:13:55) :
My passport is literally full of stamps from flights passing just south of Iceland, from San Francisco and Denver to London and back. The illustration is a fairly accurate representation of a typical route from the west coast.
The CAA was not concerned with the operational costs of the carriers. That isn’t their job. They made their decisions about public safety based on the current guidelines in place at the time of the eruption. The UK is nothing like Alaska, it has very dense air traffic and the entire country was covered by the ash cloud. The Met Office provided accurate information using lasers, satellites, and computer models.
If an airplane crashes on the UK, people die on the ground too. Like at Lockerbie.
Hey Skipper (18:13:55) :
“The intelligent way to do this would have been to quickly re-open the airspace, and let airlines make operational decisions based upon how much they are willing to tolerate accelerated maintenance costs.”
==========
Just don’t say that in front of a jury, or your passengers.
Here is my beef with Met Office/Computer model haters.
I do computer modeling professionally, and have for the last 30 years or so on a wide range of geological and engineering problems. There are few things that don’t run off computer models directly or indirectly any more. They are an essential part of our infrastructure.
I was also one of the first writers to point out the problems with Met Office seasonal and longer term climate forecasts. But there is nothing wrong with their weather models – they are current state of the art.
So when people blindly attack the Met Office for things they do well, it muddies the waters for the real issues of concern. They have become a convenient, populist scapegoat for everything. If England doesn’t make it to the quarterfinals in South Africa in June, the press will somehow find a way to blame it on the Met Office.
That is simply dead wrong.
stevengoddard:
But it is completely failed to depict the variety of routes, or their location with respect to the actual cloud I didn’t say it wasn’t, only that the illustration is incomplete: you omitted the tracks that probably 80% of the flights to Europe use. On any given day out of SEA, there are probably a couple non-stops, a couple more to Amsterdam, and all the rest go via DFW, DTW, MSP, IAD, ATL, etc. In other words, you left out most of the picture.
Note, I have not particularly faulted the Met Office (except for their apparent belief they should have a choice in operational matters), but rather the nonsensical decision to keep all the airspace closed for so long — that was simply nuts, and showed all the calm, cool,
Most importantly, though, is what the models predicted, and what actually happened: How much volcanic ash actually fell on Heathrow and continental airfields? A lot? Some? None? What was predicted? How big were the errors?
Compare how Redoubt, a volcano you can easily see from Anchorage, was handled, compared to this one, which must be a good 800 miles from Europe.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/25/volcanic-ash-air-industry-warned
Odd, some days I feel invisible.
“stevengoddard (18:44:35) :
Hey Skipper (18:13:55) :
My passport is literally full of stamps from flights passing just south of Iceland, from San Francisco and Denver to London and back. The illustration is a fairly accurate representation of a typical route from the west coast.
The CAA was not concerned with the operational costs of the carriers. That isn’t their job. They made their decisions about public safety based on the current guidelines in place at the time of the eruption. The UK is nothing like Alaska, it has very dense air traffic and the entire country was covered by the ash cloud. The Met Office provided accurate information using lasers, satellites, and computer models.
If an airplane crashes on the UK, people die on the ground too. Like at Lockerbie.”
Steven I am sure your passport is full of stamps on your routine flights. A little information on how those flights work.
Aircraft flying across the North Atlantic _normally_ follow the ocean track structure (colloquially known as the North Atlantic Track structure). There are 5 of these tracks in each direction the controllers at Prestwick centre in Scotland develop the tracks for the day UK time – mainly westbounds – and Gander Center in Canada for the night tracks -mainly eastbounds. The tracks are developed around the wind optimal modified great circle route between ocean entry and exit points typically a degree of longitude apart. Note that these are flexible tracks – if it is necessary to modify the exit or entry points or the routing due to weather then they will be modified. You will have sometimes entered the North Atlantic westbound flying over southern Ireland and other times over the Hebrides and Faroes this could be the same ocean track but modified due to strong upper winds. The same applies eastbound. Note that to a passenger things may seem very much the same, but these tracks are continually changed for efficiency – and to avoid weather and SIGMETs which include volcanic ash. Changing these ocean tracks is _routine_ every 12 hours by teams of controllers working with weather forecasters.
At the same time considerable work is going on to allow aircraft to fly ‘User Preferred Routes’. A significant percentage of aircraft crossing the Atlantic already fly routes that are NOT on ocean tracks, this percentage is expected to increase and the SESAR (Europe) and NextGen (USA) air traffic system modernizations envisage ALL aircraft flying User Preferred Routes within the next 15 years.
So where does that get us? The routes across the Atlantic are flexible, aircraft operators can to an increasing extent choose their own routes and in the mid-Atlantic this is normal (flights between the south-west of Europe and the northern South America, Carribean and southeastern USA. ) Most normal trans-oceanic aircraft types with a reduced freight load can fly for 10 hours or more. So aircraft can and do fly non-standard tracks to avoid weather and will always (note ALWAYS) have sufficient contingency fuel to avoid known and potential hazards.
The problem occurs when there is intervention from agencies that are not normally involved in this decision making process, making decisions based upon poor information from models, which are using extremely poor data. It would now appear that the information was at least an order of magnitude WRONG. See this
newspaper article
This is what happens when senior managers get involved in routine lower level decision making that they do not understand. Air traffic controllers and aircraft operators and dispatchers routinely work _extremely_ closely with their weather staff. The role is the weather staff provide information plus Bayesian confidence level (“that’s what the Met Office model is saying- but I don’t have confidence in it – the ash will more likely be far more dispersed…”), Then it is up to the controllers to make decisions defining the routes and dispatchers which routes will be flown.
Steven – confidence level in models is standard and not ‘an insult’ in all weather forecasting that’s _why_ they have a forecaster to interpret the model output – look at CCFP for example http://aviationweather.gov/products/ccfp/docs/pdd-ccfp.pdf There is always a confidence level. You will also note that the CCFP product is used to assist in flow control around severe convective weather – carrying fuel for and rerouting around forecast and potential hazards is a completely routine aviation activity.
The safety issue is complex, but if the models used by the MET office were not able to locate the ash the funding should have been used for more land and sattelite based systems to see where the ash actually was.
It is too simplistic an argument to say that planes can go down. We surely want mechanisms in place which give minimum intrusion to flight time with minimum risk. The question here comes down to whether the balance between funding measurement systems and models was appropriate, were the models overly cautious (rather than giving the best prediction they could and a margin for error) and can the models be appropriately created without the measuring systems to compare their results against reality? Without that the situation is unlikely to improve.
The MET office does not deserve the benefit of the doubt with the previous global warming revelations. That is the price you pay for being caught manipulating the figures in engineering – everything you do in future has to be checked by somebody who doesn’t. Any fool can take funding to create a computer model which says nobody can ever fly if the risk to the model maker is only giving permission to fly when their is a risk of downing a plane.
Ian W (04:26:07) :
the information you gave is all accurate, but does not contradict what I am saying. I once was on a flight from London to San Francisco that traveled directly over Iceland and then northern Greenland, to avoid very strong west winds (100 knot) further south. All engineering problems have confidence levels. Given that the behaviour of the volcano itself is unpredictable, that placed limits on how accurate any ash forecast could be.
larry (04:36:52) :
The Met Office climate models are a different issue. The reason planes were grounded was because the CAA chose to ground them, based on the existing volcanic ash standards. It took several days for the aviation regulatory bodies to gather enough data and make the decision to change the standards. The argument that this was a failure of computer models seems to have no basis.
The Daily Mash summarized the topic brilliantly, as usual:
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2655&Itemid=76
Another good Daily Mash report :
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/weekend/review/reader-offer…-201004242670/
Are you criticizing Steven Goddard for refusing take the advice of experienced aviators and tweak his argument to make it more reasonable?
Steven, are you claiming that the CAA grounded planes without any input from the Met Office?
codetech:
You shouldn’t be invisible, you were exactly right all along.
Ian W:
Thanks for a very clear and concise description of how the NAT system works. It is worth noting how dynamic that system is: at least three times out of five, the actual route clearance (received about an hour prior to track entry) was not the one in the flight plan.
stevengoddard:
How worthwhile is a forecast that is off by — at least — an order of magnitude?
Particularly considering how the CAA reacted to the volcano with the same calm, cool, analytical approach one expects from a pre-teen girl confronted with a spider.
From the newspaper article cited immediately above:
wobble (08:39:24) :
If you have a specific objection to something, then please articulate it. The “I am an aviator and you are not” statement doesn’t carry much weight.
You keep saying that the decisions were made by the Met Office based on models, which is incorrect at many levels.
And yes, west coast flights to Europe do normally pass close to Iceland. You don’t need to be a pilot to figure that out, any more than you need to be a climate scientist to know that it is cold and snowy outside.