A volcano in Iceland, which has been erupting for a number of days, is now causing disruption to air travel across Europe as a cloud of ash makes flying impossible in and out of many airports.
Flights have been cancelled in and out of many airports in North West Europe, including Britain and France, which has seen disruption to passenger services from major airports at Heathrow and Charles de Gaulle airports respectively.
The reason for the cancellations is a cloud of volcanic ash which is almost large enough to cover all of mainland Europe, which is currently centred over Scandinavia (see below diagram from the UK Met Office).
Volcanic ash dispersion chart, iceland april 2010 - courtesy of met office, uk
In This Story: France
France is a republic and the largest Western European nation. Through expansion and colonisation in the 17th and 18th centuries France became a great power and still retains territories around the world. It has a seat on the UN security council and is the world’s fourth most wealthy country with a high standard of living and strong cultural identity.
Iceland is a Nordic island country in the North Atlantic Ocean, with a population of 356,991 and an area of 103,000 km2 (40,000 sq mi), making it the most sparsely populated country in Europe. The capital and largest city is Reykjavík. Iceland is volcanically and geologically active. The interior consists of a plateau characterised by sand and lava fields, mountains, and glaciers, and many glacial rivers flow to the sea through the lowlands. Iceland is warmed by the Gulf Stream and has a temperate climate, despite a high latitude just outside the Arctic Circle.
Iceland’ gained independence in 1918 and founded a republic in 1944. Although its parliament (Althing) was suspended from 1799 to 1845, the island republic has been credited with sustaining the world’s oldest and longest-running parliament.
Hit hard by the worldwide financial crisis, the nation’s entire banking system systemically failed in October 2008, leading to an economic crisis and the collapse of the country’s three largest banks. By 2014, the Icelandic economy had made a significant recovery, in large part due to a surge in tourism.
Iceland has the smallest population of any NATO member and is the only one with no standing army, with a lightly armed coast guard.
A volcano is a rupture in the crust of a planetary-mass object, such as Earth, that allows hot lava, volcanic ash, and gases to escape from a magma chamber below the surface. On Earth, volcanoes are most often found where tectonic plates are diverging or converging, and most are found underwater.
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Create your own ash cloud forecasts! All you need is a few years of advanced maths, but for those who are interested, the calculations for ash dispersal are available here:
Volcanic eruptions that spew tephra into the atmosphere pose a hazard to jet aircraft. For this reason, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has designated nine Volcanic Ash and Aviation Centers (VAACs) around the world whose purpose is to track ash clouds from eruptions and notify aircraft so that they may avoid these ash clouds. During eruptions, VAACs and their collaborators run volcanic-ashtransport- and-dispersion (VATD) models that forecast the location and movement of ash clouds.
The paper then goes onto explain which parameters to use when calculating dispersal.
Create your own ash cloud forecasts! All you need is a few years of advanced maths, but for those who are interested, the calculations for ash dispersal are available here:
http://www2.icao.int/en/anb/met-aim/met/iavwopsg/Lists/Announcements/Attachments/1/Preliminary%20Spreadsheet%20of%20Eruption%20Source.pdf
The paper begins:
The paper then goes onto explain which parameters to use when calculating dispersal.