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How Ash Cloud Made Its Way Into The Jetstream
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A University at Buffalo volcanologist, an expert in volcanic ash cloud transport, published a paper recently showing how the jet stream -- the area in the atmosphere that pilots prefer to fly in -- also seems to be the area most likely to be impacted by plumes from volcanic ash.
"That's a problem," says Marcus I. Bursik, PhD, one of the foremost experts on volcanic plumes and their effect on aviation safety, "because modern transcontinental and transoceanic air routes are configured to take advantage of the jet stream's power,
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saving both time and fuel.
"The interaction of the jet stream and the plume is likely a factor here," says Bursik, professor of geology in the UB College of Arts and Sciences. "Basically, planes have to fly around the plume or just stop flying, as they have, as the result of this eruption in Iceland."
In some cases, if the plume can be tracked well enough with satellites, pilots can steer around the plume, he notes, but that didn't work in this case because the ash drifted right over Britain.
Bursik participated in the first meetings in the early 1990s between volcanologists and the aviation industry to develop methods to ensure safe air travel in the event of volcanic eruptions. He and colleagues authored a 2009 paper called "Volcanic plumes and wind: Jet stream interaction examples and implications for air traffic" in the Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research.
"In the research we did, we found that the jet stream essentially stops the plume from rising higher into the atmosphere," he says. "Because the jet stream causes the density of the plume to drop so fast, the plume's ability to rise above the jet stream is halted: the jet stream caps the plume at a certain atmospheric level."
Bursik says that new techniques now in development will be capable of producing better estimates of where and when ash clouds from volcanoes will travel.
He and his colleagues have proposed a project with researchers at the University of Alaska that would improve tracking estimates to find out where volcanic ash clouds are going.
"What we get now is a mean estimate of where ash should be in atmosphere," says Bursik, "but our proposal is designed to develop both the mean estimate and estimates of error that would be more accurate and useful. It could help develop scenarios that would provide a quantitative probability as to how likely a plane is to fly through the plume, depending on the route."
Bursik also is working with other researchers at UB, led by UB geology professor Greg Valentine, on a project called VHub, a 'cyber infrastructure for collaborative volcano research and mitigation.'
VHUB would speed the transfer of new tools developed by volcanologists to the government agencies charged with protecting the public from the hazards of volcanic eruptions. That international project, which Valentine heads up at UB, with researchers at Michigan Technological University and the University of South Florida, was funded recently by the National Science Foundation.
Bursik's co-authors on the jet stream paper are Shannon E. Kobs and Aaron Burns, both former UB graduate students in geology, L.I. Bazanova and I.V. Melekestves, of the Russian Academy of Sciences, A. Kurbatov of the University of Maine, Orono, and D.C. Pieri of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at California Institute of Technology.
The research was funded by NSF, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and California Institute of Technology and Science Applications International Corp.
Tags: Iceland, Volcanic, Ashcloud, Jetstream
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New Orleans Future Storm Threat Out of Control
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Half of Louisiana Will be Under Water by 2100
New Orleans can no longer be protected from hurricane storm surges, according to the US army general in charge of the city's defences.
General Robert Van Antwerp, chief of the US Army Corps of Engineers, said his team was in "persistent conflict" with the Mississippi river.
"If you ask can I protect the city, the answer is no. Can I reduce the risk? Yes.
"We can develop better early warning systems, better evacuation plans, better levees to hold back most of the water, but we cannot stop levees being overtopped and the city flooded."
He declined to say whether this meant the city should be abandoned altogether and relocated inland. "That is outside my brief," he said.
Four years after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and caused a political crisis for President George Bush, a religion, science and environment conference in the city was told that half of Louisiana will be lost by the end of the century.
The vast Mississippi delta is sinking a centimetre a year. Sea levels are rising at an accelerating rate, and will be two metres higher by the year 2100. Much of the delta is less than a metre above sea level, so most communities will be submerged.
The oil and gas industry's massive canal and pipeline network, which provides 35% of the country's gas and oil, cuts through the state's freshwater swamps and marshes, allowing vast quantities of sea water from the Gulf to wash into the delta and kill many of the trees and plants that protect the land from storm surges.
Chris Macaluso, in charge of the newly created Office of Coastal Protection, says 2,300 square miles of marsh and swamp have been lost because of salt-water intrusion in 50 years.
In the four-month hurricane season, land disappears at the rate of an acre every six minutes or 25 to 40 square miles a year.
His office is reconstructing some of the barrier islands along the Gulf to protect the remaining wetlands from wave action, but what used to be marshland behind them is now open water dotted with oil wells. Most of the once vibrant cypress forests, which could stop the storm surges, are reduced to dead stumps sticking out of the water.
"We have broken the ecosystem. What we are doing to restore it is a drop in the ocean of what is needed," Macaluso said.
His office is spending $1.5bn (about £915m) over four years on wetland restoration. Another $14.3bn is being spent on new levees and defences for New Orleans.
It is estimated that to save the delta's wetlands and its settlements from sinking by diverting the Mississippi would cost $200bn.
Prof Gerald Galloway, from the department of civil engineering at the University of Maryland, said: "We are facing catastrophe. The challenge now is to see if anybody will do anything about it."
Dr Peter Bridgewater, chairman of the UK's Joint Nature Conservation Committee, asked if he would advocate evacuation of the city, said: "New Orleans is not a place to invest in real estate.
"There needs to be dramatic changes in policy and attitude, but time is running out."
Bridgewater said wetlands were resilient and adaptable. If the Mississippi was allowed to flow across the marshes and rebuild the sediment, the swamps would regrow and a buffer could be recreated.
To allow river diversions, the army would need to review its current priority to keep the Mississippi open to navigation at all times. New Orleans is the country's largest port, and vital to the nation's economic welfare.
"We are having to rethink everything," said Van Antwerp. "But even if we get it right, and that is by no means certain, there has to be the political will to vote the money to implement what we propose."
Tags: New, Orleans, Louisiana, Deep, South, Hurricane, ...
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Miss Indonesia visits Pandag Earthquake Victims
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Miss Indonesia 2009 Qory Sandioriva visited earthquake victims in Padang, West Sumatra on Sunday (Oct 25) under sponsorship of Yayasan Puteri Indonesia and Mustika Ratu.
During her visit, Qory presented relief aid to, and held a dialog with earthquake victims at the Kurao Pagang disaster relief command post in Nanggalo subdistrict, Padang.
The relief aid consisted of cash, tents, and foodstuffs.
Qory who was born in Jakarta, August 17, 1991, said she had come to Padang as she was touched by the fate of the earthquake victims.
"It was a powerful earthquake and many people have become victims," she said.
She said she was glad she could be in the midst of the earthquake victims and share the grief of the residents of Ranah Minang (Padang) who had lost property and relatives, and hugged the mothers among the victims.
An earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter Scale rocked West Sumatra on Wednesday (Sept 30). In the disaster, more than a thousand West Sumatrams died under the rubble of collapsed buildings and the soil of landslides.
Padang city and Padang Pariaman district were the parts of West Sumatra hardest hit by the temblor.
Although relief aid has been flowing in since not long after the eathquake, hundreds of thousands of people still need tents as temporary shelter.
According to Ahmad Gazali, an activist of local NGO Kabisat, West Sumatra residents whose homes were damaged or destroyed still need about 200,000 tents for temporary shelter.
Tags: Earthquake, Pandag, Indonesia, Victims, Miss, Qor...
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