In Defense Of The Met Office

The plane disaster in Indonesia involved a plane at night that was unaware of the eruption. There’s no reason why flights couldn’t have been re-scheduled so that planes flew in daylight hours where pilots could see the airspace ahead of them. No planes were grounded when Pinatubo erupted which was a much bigger eruption.

Pat Moffitt (08:25:12) :
The Met was correct in immediately grounding the flights— their failure was not following up with testing
The Met Office don’t have the power to ground aircraft, they just provided the data for others (NATS and the CAA in the UK I think) to make the decision.
That said I’m happy and surprised to be in broad agreement with Steven Goddard.

Steven Goddard is completely off track.
No one wants an airplane going across an ash cloud.
As an ash cluod is released by a volcano, a math model can suggest where and how that cloud is moving.
Only observations, taken by military air crafts, satellite sensors, lidars, high land stations, can plot the real edge of the ash cloud.
The model is just a first guess of the ash movement.
If a first and fast reaction can be to close the air space downwind the eruption site, also with the help of a model, then you have to take measurements at once.
Instead, burocrats relied only on models. Real time observations were taken into account too many day later.
No other options ara allowed, at least reasonable ones!
P.S. Airplanes are faster then winds.

Your pushing of the “precautionary approach” might just pass the test of common sense in a theoretical world where the choice were between flying and not flying, but this is the real world.
People do not fly will travel by other means. There are people who have driven across Europe at the end of a long holiday with no real sleep for three days on the wrong side of the road and how many people in the Health and Safety brigade are taking responsibility for this clear and known danger to people’s safety?
Moreover, this whole shame has cost around a billion. The typical hospital costs 70million, so in order to fulfil someone idea of “health” we have effectively 14 less hospital’s worth to spend on health and transport infrastructure which would definitely cut deaths. Compare that to the “might have caused a plane to have a few problems which have been 100% recoverable from in the past even when they didn’t know there was a cloud”.
We in Britain are already facing severe cuts to services which do save lives. If as seems quite reasonable the airlines sue the Government for their incompetent handling of the scare there will be even less money for essential services. There won’t be the social workers to check on children at risk. There won’t be the money to repair the roads that lead to accidents on the roads. There won’t be the cancer care in the NHS. There won’t be the money in the economy to create the employment – and unemployment is a known contributor to mental health problems.
To put my views in short: if the Met Office and Government had spent more time worrying about real problems like volcano ash and did the appropriate science rather than listening to idiots like mann then there would have been the measurements to tell them that this was just a lot of hot air!

I’ve been on trans-Atlantic flights where another jumbo jet crossed paths within half a mile. No doubt a screw up, and the idea of quickly rerouting hundreds of jets around an unpredictable ash plume seems unmanageable.
The relative velocity of two jumbo jets in opposite directions is faster than the speed of a high velocity .22 LR bullet. How good are you at dodging several hundred bullets in the air at the same time?

Today’s consumer is unaware or unwilling to analyze risk. They just want ot get there. The airline should figure out how. Having seen what happened on the ground after Mt. St. Helens, with ash clogging air filters and ruining engines, I think the MET was totally correct at the start. Perhaps they held on too long, but a ruined engine in a car is an annoyance. A ruined engine (or two or four) in the air is a slightly bigger problem. You don’t always have Capt. Scully in the cockpit.

“”” MJK (08:16:04) :
Steven,
I could not agree more with this analsyis. It is the prudent, risk mitigating thing to do. What I cannot understand is why you do not apply the same logic to climate change. A large number of models and scientists are telling us to be prudent and take action yet you choose to ignore them and take a wait and see approach. I for one am extremely dissapointed that people such as yourself are taking such a huge gamble with our collective future. shame on you.
MJK. “””
Well MJK, perhaps the reasoning is that the very same people who are predicting; excuse me projecting, those not yet proven future maybes; using the exact same computer models that make those predictions; forgive me projections; also say that virtually nothing we do will have any perceptible effect on the outcome, which they say is already pre-ordained.
The “precautionary” principle, is often cited to support a belief in god, or allah, the creator; whatever euphemism you want to choose. If you believe and when you die, it turns out you were wrong; well no harm, you will never be aware you were wrong; but if you don’t believe, and you end up being wrong, then you are going to catch hell. So you might as well believe; it’s the safe choice.
It’s also the epitome of total selfishness; motivated by nothing but absolute self interest.
Note I am not making an argument against a belief in a supreme creator; simply citing an often given argument.
Does a useless waste of resources, that could better the lives of billions of present and future people; not also violate the precautionary principle.
Or to put it another way; if you send out five ships laden with cargo; following a belief that one of them, at least should be able to make it to the destination; what is your contingency plan to deal with the glut, in the event that all five ships arrive safely ?
With the route that Steven has plotted above, a very slight deviation beginning at Seattle could take the plane to the North of Iceland by enough to miss that prominent South East plume; with a minimal extra distance; but once you got past Iceland you have very little freedom of choice.
The MET office could be faulted for poor modelling; but they didn’t make the no fly rule. The overbearing European Union bosses did. Right now America is stampeding rapidly in their footsteps.
But MJK, I would suggest that your comparison of this somewhat minor geologic event; with a total destruction of the entire world economic base; because of a string of dire predictions (that’s PREDICTIONS); none of which have so far come to pass; nor find any parallel in the climate history of the planet over geologic time scales; is akin to driving a whole herd of bison over a cliff, just to get a steak for dinner.

Xi Chin (08:40:53) :
People can sign whatever they want, but their relatives are still going to sue the airline for everything they are worth.
I flew every few weeks to Europe after 9/11, and the planes were nearly deserted for almost a year. People were scared to fly. One plane going down in the ash would have been a much bigger loss to the airlines than one week of forced closure of the British airspace.
I was in Hawaii in June, 1974 when the movie Jaws hit the theaters. The swimming was great, because very few people were going in the water. People value their safety, and one incident real or imagined can have a huge impact on business.

Let’s review this post:
“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.”
1) Meteorological information is updated in flight.
2) Observations show the plume over the crater and in its close vicinity only was shooting up to 6,000m and that 50km away from it the plume was following the lines of cold air advection at an altitude comprised between 2 to 3,000m. Thus a small trajectory diversion could avoid the problem over Iceland.
“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.”
1) Is the volcanic eruption monitored of not? That’s what VAAC is all about.
2) Again the diversion is not in thousands of miles
3) You point out the circulation models and clearly there was a problem there: the concept used is critical to making provisional decisions. The ash plume was perfectly traceable, followed a known meteorological phenomenon (Leroux’s Mobile Polar Highs). Therefore the dispersal of the ash plume was predictable in this context both in space and in time, provided the Met had worked with the proper concept.
“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.”
1) Of course not,
2) Hence the critical importance of working with the proper meteo concept and a quality monitoring of the ongoing explosive phase of the eruption, quite a difference with Mt. St. Helen.
3) Backing this concept with early measurement flights, and then make the decisions of selective closures.
“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.”
1) Blanket precautionary principle is not science based decision
2) Suggesting that science and engineering of monitoring and measuring the ash plume predictable dispersal should take over 5 days to get going simply betrays the state of un-preparedness of the authorities.
3) Finally, the resounding silence of the climatically correct: those who, claiming to understand climate, are in fact predicting the occurrence of weather phenomenon in 2050 were nowhere to be seen or heard. It is true their prediction could have been verified in about a week. It was a real crisis to be managed and responses would attract scrutiny. 2050 is much safer…

I think Steve is right and wrong here.
1) It’s a good thing that the MET made decisions that they have. It’s extremely important to use the utmost caution when you’re talking about flights in the vicinity of volcanoes. Volcanic ash WILL shut jet engines down. There are numerous incidents of this. Check the NTSB incident reports. Prudence is the better part of valor. This is especially true in aviation.
2) He’s wrong, or just didn’t do any research on, the circumstances of a flight. There are very strict rules governing any flight, especially flights over water. There are specific fuel requirements, alternate landing sites, etc. No flight ever leaves the ground without fully thinking through potential emergencies at any phase of the flight.