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.
R. Gates says:
May 16, 2010 at 7:48 pm
But there are no political statements here…
Until yours! So, speak for yourself, and not others.
So you are pleased that thousands of people are very badly inconvenienced by the forces of nature. Well, perhaps you celebrate floods and earthquakes? Or is that somehow different? Is it just because these people are trying to do something that you personally disapprove of?
And as for nature being more powerful than us, yes it is. It also is not impacted at all, at least by all the evidence, by the tiny percentage of a percent of the atmosphere that we are adding in the way of CO2, apart from plants getting more to eat.
There is great hope for even greater accuracy in computer models of the climate judging by the ash cloud scenario
A month ago it closed the whole of Europe, such was the uncertainty of the ash clouds location and effects.
Today the Met office have so improved their forecasts that Gatwick airport can allow outgoing flights but not incoming ones as the Ash cloud is ‘only’ two miles away.
This degree of accuracy and precision has been gained in such a short time scale that I expect a daily forecast of our evolving climate for the next five hundred years will be so good that all debate will be effectively stifled. 🙂
Tonyb
OK, here is how you should pronounce Eyjafjallajokull
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/video/pronounce-eyjafjallajokull-10392613
or even worse:
It reminds me of “lieutenant” pronounced “leftenant”
I think the kull ending means mountain or some such, but why they pronounced it “kurt” is anybodies guess. Anglosaxon mentality . 🙂
el gordo says: “If Katla blows it will be a trifecta, along with a cool PDO and solar minimum. The AGW signal will disappear forever.”
davidmhoffer says: “I think it would just cause a polarity reversal.”
Let’s face it, the AGW message is harder to forecast than climate.
My money (for the short term at least) is on them using it to get out of jail: “The eruption has masked AGW, which will resume a few years after the volcano has died down. We must not waste this great opportunity to reduce emissions.”.
(Usable for any volcano, even Eyathingy. NB. There is no need for it to be logical.).
I have been using this site to see how the ash is moving
http://oiswww.eumetsat.org/IPPS/html/MSG/RGB/DUST/WESTERNEUROPE/index.htm
I also allows the user to look back at previous events.
Last Friday 14 May 2010 shows a large ash cloud over west Scotland.
My wife is flying Dublin-London-Mauritius on Wednesday May 19th. Thanks for the update!
Doug in Seattle says:
May 16, 2010 at 9:42 pm
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.
A hole in one! Bang on the nail! Bullseye!
Now considering this excellent pyrotechnic display by Mother-Nature, showing her all mighty power to one & all, just how many degrees was it last year that Mr Obama & Mr Brown (ex) were going to limit the world to over the next 90 years? Why are they, or at least Mr Obama, not waving there hands ordering the volcano to “OBEY” & cease!
“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. ”
When does a cloud become a trace or even a figment of a model? Thousands of planes have flown through slight traces of ash since the start of the jet age with no effect. They must have because they didn’t have supercomputers and modellers telling them to avoid imaginary areas, thousands of miles from an eruption. Are you seriously suggesting there is a ‘cloud of ash’ over Heathrow? or Israel or North Africa? As the detection gets more sophisticated they’ll be able to identify ash many thousands of miles away and ban flights. I don’t think that’s what the flight manual meant when it said ‘don’t fly through and ash cloud’! Pilots would have been told to give the visible cloud a miss by a 100 miles or so 10 tears ago. Now it’s 5000 miles!!
What there is is a model suggesting there might be x grams per cubic metre or whatever. Computer says no.
This is nothing more that risk aversion and cya from authorities. And it is very serious.
cheers David
A somewhat alarmist statement by UK aviation expert David Learmount, as reported by the BBC, says that volcanic eruptions from Eyjafjallajokull could continue to disrupt UK air traffic for the next 20 years.
BTW: When spoken by the Microsoft Sam or Anna voices, I believe the spelling:
[A’ya vill lev vich’k] will approximate an audio file of the Icelandic volcano name that someone provided in an earlier article.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8685229.stm
Looks like a good time to send over a group of alarmist scientists to start building a geothermal power plant on the mountain.
“Wally the Walrus says:
May 16, 2010 at 11:22 pm
……
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?”
Wally you’ve hit the nail on the head, but it’s the wrong nail. If I had the authority to stop people taking any risk, and I would be blamed if they were killed or injured, then guess what – I’d ban them doing it. A colleague of mine was taking somwe students to a mediterranean island to study coastal stuff. They were all over 21 and had sub aqaua licenses. She banned them from diving ‘because if anything went wrong I’d be blamed’. She had the authority and used it. This is the same syndrome on a larger scale.
The police in the UK now close major motorways for 12 hours so they can investigate road accidents to their satisfaction. They don’t want to be criticised for not doing a ‘perfect’ job. Anyone can abuse thier authority to cover their own arse regardless of the consequences on others.
cheers David
A big “Thank you!” to all who replied with links to quake and tremor sites!
The quake data looks interesting… I notice there’s been a quake right under Katla in the last couple of hours, plus a few under the erupting one.
I checked the Katla pages that have the English disclaimer saying they are for the erupting one, and I did find that a little odd. The data on them is current now, though, and I do see one reason why Katla could be mentioned as it is; the monitoring sites on the page are close enough to the erupting one to be affected.
I’m wondering why the is a corolation between the erupting one and Katla? True, they are close, but I’ve never heard of this kind of sequential eruptions anywhere else. My guess would be that the timing is the key. It appears that the Katla eruptions occur after an Eyjafjallajokull (I had to copy-paste the name, ugh) eruption ends. Could that be becuase the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull causes a deflation of its magma chamber, reducing crustal compressive forces Katla’s and allowing it to fill? Or maybe they share a common magmatic system? I find the latter questionable, because Katla is the more active of the two. (Katla sometimes erupts without being preceded by Eyjafjallajokull). It is all speculation though; we don’t know if every Eyjafjallajokull eruption triggers Katla, just that the last three have.
Katla is about due, historically speaking, and it did show warning signs in 1999, though it has been relatively quiet since.
One silver lining if Katla blows… at least it’s easy to spell and pronounce. 😛
Wally (11:24): After ten weeks of trading ideas and insults with that nest of Warmist vipers on Deltoid, they have exiled me as denialist persona-non-grata.
After much deliberation I conclude that the AGW theory is plausible, and hinges on two premises: (a) That the forcing effect of CO2 dwarfs all others such as solar and volcanic activity (b) That Earth’s climate is governed by unstable equilibrium.
Demolish (a) or (b) and we can stop all this nonsense and go down the pub instead.
Just had a thought as to what to do with all those nuclear weapons Obama wants to get rid of. Sort of like back-burning to stop bushfires 🙂
Brent Hargreaves says:
May 17, 2010 at 2:26 am
Yay!
Mine’s a Guinness!
Arizona CJ: I discovered the Vedur website just a few days before you. Its coloured blobs on the map make the earth tremors very easy to interpret.
I then had a look at the histories of different volacanos, and the cubic kilometres of “tephra” (word for the day!) they have spewed out. Call it a MSHU (Mount Saint Helens Unit). which is 1km3. Eyjafjallajokull scores a piffling fraction of a MSHU; its eastern neighbour Katla scored a 1.0 in 1918 and its northern neighbour Hekla scored an 8 a thousand years ago. To put these in further context, Krakatoa (1883) scored 20 and Pinatubo (1991) scored 10. In 1815 the mighty Tambora (score 100… a hundred Mount Saint Helens!) caused starvation around the world in the 1816 ‘year with no summer’.
Do you see what I see on the Vedur website… little earthquakes on Katla and Hekla? Scary stuff! Are they waking up? I propose we send Patchauri, Gore, Hansen & co to the summit of Hekla to persuade it not to pop.
Historically how long does it take Katla to blow after Eyja?
—
Apparently, the damned thing is going to keep on erupting until the entire Western world learns how to pronounce “Eyjafjallajokull” correctly.
—
—
With the understanding that these expulsions are propelled upward by the release of compressed subterranean gases, have there been estimations of the chemical nature of these gases and the masses (or volumes) thereof?
Beyond the solid ejecta – which will either tumble immediately to the ground and add to the local landscape or get blown away to sift down into the ocean and upon land many hundreds of miles away – there is a contribution to the earth’s atmosphere being made here, and the nature of that addition seems worth considering.
—
Brent Hargreaves
May 16, 2010 at 8:33 pm
Popped over to the link you left, Deltoid, not the most patience souls in town.
I think you’re better off persona non grata, their lack of respect, vindictiveness and poor manners hardly promotes their point of view.
Kudos to Antony and the moderators, we all get heated a times, but its capped by the rules of an open forum.
Thanks for the update. I have Swedish friends that flew back home late last week.
I guess they dodged this eruption OK!
The harmful effects to a turbine engine in a dust or sand storm i.e. wear and reduction of useful life is much worse than the cloud of volcanic plume. The stuff in the volcanic cloud forms a hard glass type substance on the hot turbine blades, thus causing a turbulent airflow that leads to reverse flow [backfire and the engine flames out]
when the turbine cools, the glass under stress shatters and falls off, and the engine restarts as good as new. If you have enough altitude and time, to cool the engines all is well, but a worrying time nontheless. This only happens flying through the concentrated plume, hence the American view to fly around the concentrated plume.
If you can not fly over it or around it, fly under it. The Europeans seem to have taken PC totally timid chicken little approach to all things. Aircraft Engineer from the past where a pair of pliers and a piece of wire still worked.
P.S. And pilots made decisions not computers. It worked fine then.
This could go on for 100 to 1000’s of years what a joke. Solution: put a filter in front of each engine that pushes particles aside/out Engine filters
Re:Arizona CJ says:
May 16, 2010 at 4:58 pm
“Would anyone have any links to seismic data for Katla, the neighboring, far larger volcano about 20 miles away?”
My favorite volcano blog is-
http://scienceblogs.com/eruptions/
Which is inhabited by people that understand this stuff. Look out for Jón Frímann who has a site here-
http://www.simnet.is/jonfr500/earthquake/tremoren.htm
with some seismic data, and other geologists have also posted links to more, plus their views.
“The last three times the current erupting volcano (which i cannot spell) has erupted, Katla has erupted within a year of the smaller volcano’s eruption ending. Katla’s eruptions tend to be far larger, around 10x the current one.”
Correlation doesn’t equal causation though 🙂 Volcanoes seem like climate science and just because we’ve got evidence of prior climate shifts, it doesn’t necessarily mean we’re responsible for this one, or Hekla will blow on cue. Helka’s been discussed on the Eruptions blog quite a lot, but the geologists and volcanologists there seem a far more cautious bunch than our global warming doomsday prophets.
Also it’s not just Helka that may be becoming more active, eg Chaiten in Chile’s doing it’s bread rising impression-
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=-42.832778,-72.645833&spn=0.1,0.1&t=h&q=-42.832778,-72.645833
for an old image, and-
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=43100
for a more recent one showing volcanoes can do deforestation as well as we can, if not better.
Grumbler says:
May 17, 2010 at 2:12 am
“Wally the Walrus says:
May 16, 2010 at 11:22 pm
……
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?”
Wally you’ve hit the nail on the head, but it’s the wrong nail. If I had the authority to stop people taking any risk, and I would be blamed if they were killed or injured, then guess what – I’d ban them doing it. A colleague of mine was taking somwe students to a mediterranean island to study coastal stuff. They were all over 21 and had sub aqaua licenses. She banned them from diving ‘because if anything went wrong I’d be blamed’. She had the authority and used it. This is the same syndrome on a larger scale.
The police in the UK now close major motorways for 12 hours so they can investigate road accidents to their satisfaction. They don’t want to be criticised for not doing a ‘perfect’ job. Anyone can abuse thier authority to cover their own arse regardless of the consequences on others.
cheers David
These kind of people would sue their Mothers for giving birth to them, since the risk of eventually dying is 100%.