By Steve Goddard
Eyjafjallajokull continues to erupt and is again shutting down British airspace:
A statement on the Nats website said the no-fly zone will be extended between 1pm and 7pm today to include Manchester, Liverpool, Carlisle, Doncaster, Humberside and East Midlands airports, all airports in Northern Ireland and Scottish airports, including Prestwick.
The animated image below shows the Met Office ash forecast for the next few days.
They are forecasting that by May 19 the ash cloud will move to the north. Their forecasts assume a constant eruption pattern and are based on modeled changes in wind patterns. Let’s see how they do.
Mt. St Helens erupted 30 years ago this week.
Funny how a simple volcanic eruption can spawn such an equally volcanic eruption of political [self-snip].
I personally find it refreshing that volcanoes can cause such a disruption in air travel in our modern times…as though air-travel was some basic human right as opposed to an incredible luxury. Nature has a way of reminding us who ultimately is in charge…
el gordo says:
May 16, 2010 at 6:11 pm
If Katla blows it will be a trifecta, along with a cool PDO and solar minimum. The AGW signal will disappear forever.>>
I think it would just cause a polarity reversal. Jones, Mann, Hanson and the rest of the climate muppets would run the new data in their models and announce that the combination of ash and human emissions would enhance negative feedbacks resulting in an ice age. Gets them off the hook for the coming cooling cycle, Gore gets to make a new movie, the IPCC gets to propose new cut backs and tax schemes, a whole raft of research papers get released pointing to various extinctions and hotter/cooler/stormier/calmer/same/different weather and proclaiming that it has already started, itz worse than we thought, and demanding more research money. Puchauri will claim that Himalayan glaciers will cover all of India by 2035. Lindzen and Eschenbach etc etc would point out that climate is cyclical, that human emissions are logarithmic and so cutting back won’t do much to stop the cooling anyway, which doesn’t appear to be significant in any event.
The warmists will become coolists. The skeptics will still be skeptics, but they will have a whole new raft of cool-aid jokes.
Jeez, am I sick of this thing! I keep forgetting its pronunciation, so I found this, it appears to be credible information:
“Meanwhile, NPR which checked Eyjafjallajokull pronunciation to Iceland’s embassy in Washington D.C. found it as ‘AY-yah-fyah-lah-YOH-kuul.’ ”
…OK, so now no excuses for spelling & pronunciation errors!
Richard Hill and your filter proposal.
Anything mankind does is insignificant to natural processes. Even a small scale volcanic eruption is magnitudes larger than the nuclear bombs that humans make.
Have a look at some of the available videos of the Eyjafjoll eruption. There are volcanic bombs being hurled all over the place, volcanic lightning, ash being sent up to 9 kms skyward. This is major energy in play here. Human efforts are puny compared to the this.
Iceland’s eruptions are not so serious in the ash fall / weather change category. Its the associated long term fluorine emissions that have historically caused most of the problems in Europe.
Five witpoints to Jorgekafkazar for his “An inconvenient fact, not to be confused with ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ which was also a spewing of hot, noxious gases from an ash hole.” and five bonus points for CodeTech’s “Just so you know, that resulted in the spewing of cold Root Beer all over my monitor.. :)”. Superb!
For the opposite to witty banter, come and join in the fun at:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man.php
where more typical language is: ‘We defer to the scientists, you denialist moron troll”. I’m seriously outnumbered there, and could do with backup.
What deplorable laziness to call the volcano E+15!
Look, it’s easy, it’s Eya…. correction…. Eyjafallyajok…. oh all right it’s EyetawdItawapuddytat.
Nice close up video of Eyja:
R. Gates – “Nature has a way of reminding us who ultimately is in charge…” ; keep thinking like that and you will soon be a complete skeptic about the human influence on climate. cheers.
Mick says:
May 16, 2010 at 6:54 pm
Jet can clog-up, rocket engine not so.
“Who is investing in sub-orbital flights??”
Rocket engines and rocket propelled planes: Scaled Composites Burt Rutan
http://www.xcor.com/products/engines/4A3_LOX_alcohol_rocket_engine.html
But clogged up jet-engines is not the only problem to overcome!
– clogged up pitot tubes for measuring the air speed
– clogged up holes for measuring static pressure out side the plane
– sanding of the cockpit windows and the airframe by the volcanic particles
damaging sensors and GPS/VHF/Transponder antennas
– static electric discharges effecting electronic and communication equipment
– poisonous gases entering the cockpit and cabin
Current risk management measures allow us to handle the ash risks effectively.
No need to find a replacement for the jet-engine.
All we can do is learn to live with volcanic eruptions and accept the consequences which unfortunately include the temporary closure of airports and airspace.
u.k.(us) says:
May 16, 2010 at 5:03 pm
I may be mistaken, but I believe jet engines have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to volcanic ash.
Actually its the European air regulators who have a zero (or very close to zero) tolerance for ash. Airlines in US fly around volcanic plumes. The problem is one of concentration – not detection. The Euro regulators have adopted something akin to the precautionary principle when it comes to ash, while their American counterparts have examined the risk and have allowed the airlines to set rational thresholds.
davidmhoffer says:
May 16, 2010 at 7:48 pm
“The warmists will become coolists. The skeptics will still be skeptics, but they will have a whole new raft of cool-aid jokes”.
That’s how they started!
Industrial emissions were the cause for Global Cooling in the seventies!
http://omniclimate.wordpress.com/2009/12/03/world-exclusive-cia-1974-document-reveals-emptiness-of-agw-scares-closes-debate-on-global-cooling-consensus-and-more/
#
Richard Hill says:
May 16, 2010 at 5:51 pm
“This is a left field question.
Has anyone seen a proposal for some sort of a filter dome over the eruption?
At its base, the cloud isnt so big. It might be cheaper to filter the ash out in
Iceland, than stop flights all over Europe. Think of a huge mesh of cables, supported by helium balloons outside the plume.
Then water could be sprayed into the ash cloud”.
I think it’s easier to find another planet.
CRS, Dr.P.H. says:
May 16, 2010 at 7:57 pm
I’ll never get that one right, so I came up with EyeFullOfJoKool.
btw… right fine time to be on a Helicopter fleeing the Arctic, sled-pulling Olympic feats aside.
Hey Skipper says:
May 16, 2010 at 7:44 pm
This is from my company’s flight operations manual:
“Flight into a cloud of volcanic ash must be avoided.”
=========================
“Flight into a cloud of volcanic ash must be avoided.”
What part of this statement, made by the engine maker, does nobody seem to understand.
Tremor Graphs of Iceland, anyone?
http://hraun.vedur.is/ja/englishweb/tremor.html
Latest quakes in Iceland:
http://hraun.vedur.is/ja/englishweb/
Zooming in on the Volcano itself:
http://hraun.vedur.is/ja/englishweb/myrjokull.html
I think the most interesting aspect to the eruption of Eyejustajollylocal, is the actual pronunciation of it’s name…. It’s a good thing its not really serious. Otherwise we’d not be able to escape its effects, nor pronounce its name. Indeed a tragedy.
Perhaps BP should just lower a large ‘top hat’ on top of it to plug this leak in the earth?
Or wait. That wouldn’t work. Its apparently 2 million degrees C – or was it F? – according to a world famous Nobel laureate.
Speaking of things that could really blow up, seems there may be much more to the incredible Mann-made hockey stick:
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=5700&linkbox=true&position=1
Okay, sand and not volcanic dust but……….
I noted that Cairo airport shut down the other day but looking at the reconstruction from the Met Office the cloud is nowhere near the place. All we have had in Cyprus is the usual Sahara dust!
This is all Iceland’s vengeance on the UK for the banking regulators pulling the plug on their bubble-banks.
It’s vaguely reminiscent of the old joke about the most important organ in the body…
Just imagine if a plane were to fly through the ash, and crash.
Then Branson would like a bit (more) of a git.
There’s a reason engine and plane makers don’t specify a safe level of ash. They don’t know. And flying around at 30,000 feet, how would you propose to measure it (on a flight by flight basis) to see if its safe? Oh… oops, sorry, the ash is above limits. Did those engines just stop? Oops. Sorry about that.
Those who complain about the flight bans are off in la-la land, or think that man is strong enough or clever enough to manage and overcome all risks.
Engineering is all about prudent design that includes factors of safety, all built from about 2000 years experience gained in building bridges and buildings that have periodically fallen down and killed people. Aviation is just an extension of the same.
When you don’t know if its safe, you don’t allow a tin tube with 500 people to go there. Who’d want the death toll on their head?
davidmhoffer
You summed it up perfectly, itz a travesty.
Oh, and Brent (above). There’s no point taking on Deltoid. You might as well just pop outside and smack your head into a wall a few times. You’ll get the same pain but get it over and done with a lot faster.
Found in: CRS, Dr.P.H. on May 16, 2010 at 7:57 pm
“Hey ya fellah, yo cool!”
That should do for a “close enough” pronunciation. To pull it off a bit better just provide a bit of drunken slur (not included with this offer, YMMV).
Go to Richard North’s blog and check out:-
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/05/unfinished-business.html
He is absolutely 100% correct. Of course planes shouldn’t fly through ash plumes. But here in the UK we are again at the mercy of the little men and their “computer models”. We have just one plane kitted out with the equipment to actually measure ash concentrations, particle sizes, type of mineral and all the rest. For some strange European reason, that is apparently in France at the moment.
So, if some bearded “scientist” looks at his computer screen, having fed in some data from our trusted and reliable chums The MET Office, and sees “worse than we thought” – then, that’s it! Airports close!
It all seems familiar, somehow.
But in any case why would anyone want some actual unadulterated measurements when their computer can belch out as many finely crafted scenarios as you care to consider?
Surely better to inconvenience hundreds of thousands of people and drive the airline industry into the ground than invest in the proper equipment to take actual measurements?