Great news for air travelers this evening. The eruption in Iceland is now putting out much less ash and the cloud is much lower. The low level ash is not headed toward the UK as the image above shows.

The snow-cap that covered the volcano has melted away. This has reduced the steam/ash combination that was climbing to over 3,000 meters.

Even more good news tonight. The upper level and lower level winds will push any new ash cloud to the North of the UK and France. It looks likely that airports will be opening across Western Europe tomorrow and this is now being confirmed by the BBC.

The weather radar at the Keflivik Airport is not seeing a plume from the ash cloud this evening. The last report from the UK Met. Office is a plume height of 16,000 feet. This is much lower than over much of the last 72 hours.

There is also good news on the flight restrictions. The lower levels are looking much better. It looks possible that flights could operate from Paris tomorrow, and even some domestic UK flights might be possible.

The UK has now grounded aircraft through 1AM GMT Sunday. The ash cloud has gotten worse and there is a new plume headed toward Europe as the image above indicates. Meteorologists from the Iceland Met Office flew o Friday near the volcano to check the height of the ash cloud and reported it is nearly 30,000 feet (10,000 meters).

The upper level winds at this level will steer the ash toward NW and Central Europe. The conditions may very well worsen over the weekend.

Why?

Look at the winds forecasted for Sunday at 34,000 feet from the UK Met Office numerical weather prediction model:

A “Eureka Alert from SCIENCE late Friday has some interesting and alarming news:

Public release date: 16-Apr-2010
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Contact: Jay Miller
miller@iodp.tamu.edu
979-845-5740
Texas A&M University

Icelandic volcanoes can be unpredictable and dangerous, say Texas A&M prof

If history is any indication, the erupting volcano in Iceland and its immense ash plume could intensify, says a Texas A&M University researcher who has explored Icelandic volcanoes for the past 25 years.

Jay Miller, a research scientist in the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program who has made numerous trips to the region and studied there under a Fulbright grant, says the ash produced from Icelandic volcanoes can be a real killer, which is why hundreds of flights from Europe have been cancelled for fear of engine trouble.

“What happens is that the magma from the volcano is around 1,200 degrees and it hits the water there, which is near freezing,” he explains. “What is produced is a fine ash that actually has small pieces of glass in it, and it can very easily clog up a jet engine. If you were to inhale that ash, it would literally tear up your lungs.”

Miller says most volcanoes in Iceland erupt only about every five years on average and are relatively mild, but history is repeating itself. Extremely large eruptions occurred there in 934 A.D. and again in 1783 that covered Europe with ash much like today.

“Ben Franklin was ambassador to France in 1783 and he personally witnessed the large ash clouds over Europe, and he later wrote that it was a year in which there was no summer,” Miller adds. “The big question now is, what happens next? It’s very possible this eruption could last for quite some time, but no one knows for sure. Volcanoes in that part of the world are very hard to predict.”

—–

Here below is the latest ash coverage forecast from the UK Met Office:

More soon,

Dan

A lot of TV weather people avoid talking about climate change on air. There are multiple reasons for this. Among them are the fact that the person you see doing the weather on TV in many cases does not know that much about science. (Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to stop some from saying some really silly things.)

The number one reason is the political overtones involved in it. This is actually a good reason not to do it and something I thought long and hard before I said something.

There are two parts to this story and here is why I decided to do it.

What we DO about climate change is a political issue.  The reality of the threat and it’s magnitude is a scientific question.  Especially when you consider that the average person sees only one person with a background in science each day.

Who??

The person giving them the forecast on TV.

I’ve long thought that those of us who are real meteorologists with a background in atmospheric physics have an obligation to provide accurate scientific information. We get plenty of questions about science everyday, from “What’s that bright star in the western sky?” to “How big was that quake??”

So with that justification for doing so, the next question becomes “what do I say??”.

This is where things have gotten really messed up.

I was on an advisory panel for a survey of TV weather people on climate change. It was conducted by Ed Maibach of George Mason University. The results of this survey absolutely floored me. 26% of the respondents believe global warming is a scam.

This is amazing.

I shouldn’t be surprised.  Just this week, I heard one on-air weathercaster blame the sun and another claimed the planet is getting cooler!

Why are so many TV weather people  so skeptical?

I wish I knew. The lack of science training in some may be a factor, but I think it is much deeper than that. I know some really smart forecasters who make a right turn into a brick wall when it comes to climate change.

It is very difficult to forecast the weather for the next 7 days and perhaps the idea of talking about the weather 100 years ahead is the problem. I used to feel exactly the same way. I’ve since learned that climate and weather  are two very different things.

The climate science community needs to work hard on explaining this to TV weather people and the public at large. Weathercasters on the other hand need to take a page from good journalists and learn to set aside political beliefs and really study the science. Especially if they are going to talk about it on air. They have an obligation to do so.

With this in mind, should I not say on air that scientists are divided? That there is deep division and the science is not good?

Let’s look at it from a logical and scientific perspective.

EVERY major scientific organisation on Earth has endorsed the IPCC reports. This includes strongly worded warnings, that we must act, from the American Meteorological Society, the AGU, the AAAS.

The oldest and most distinguished scientific body on Earth, The Royal Society has done likewise. Then there is NASA and NOAA the two major government science bodies in America. They too agree.

On the other side you have a tiny handful of scientists, only a few of which have published anything recently in peer reviewed journals, who disagree. Even more telling is to look online at the number of scientists who are writing blogs about the latest research.

Real Climate is the most popular and is written by several scientists from NASA and Universities. Climate Progress is another one that takes on the political issue and covers the science. Joe Romm the author has a doctorate in physics. Only in it for the Gold is another excellent resource by Dr. Michael Tobis.

The most popular blog on the “other side” is written by a retired TV weatherman who never even finished an undergraduate degree in either Meteorology or climatology. In second place is one written by the former spin master for extreme right wing Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma, who has said that all the scientists in the world are perpetrating the greatest hoax in human history. Yet another is written by someone who has a doctorate in, wait for it…

political science.

This in itself should tell you something, but it still does not cover the science.

Peer review and scientific method have taken us from living in log cabins to exploring the outer planets in two centuries. The great thing about the way science works is that the knowledge is built upon those that have come before.

If you want to make the claim that the sun is responsible for climate change, then you will need to show why the dozens of papers that show it’s not are wrong. You need to show why people like Dr. Judith Lean at the U.S. Naval Observatory is wrong when she puts together a graph of the sun’s output showing it has been remarkably constant in the last 50 years.

You also will need to show why Dr. Ben Santer is wrong. Santer showed conclusively that the pattern of warming is not what we would see from the sun getting brighter, but it IS what we would see if it were increasing greenhouse gases. There are many more too.

If you want to claim the planet is getting cooler then you need to show why Michael Mann’s data showing a stunning warming trend is wrong. A lot of people have tried.  Every single scientific review of the data says he has it right.

You will also need to show why almost every tropical glacier on the planet is melting and the rate of the melting of the Greenland Ice Cap is increasing. While your at it, explain why the ocean temperatures are warming and hundreds of species are migrating northward in the Northern Hemisphere., while the planet cools. There are a dozen other independent climate proxies that all show warming.

Why are all of these wrong???

The world of science is waiting. All you have to do is write it up and submit it to a peer reviewed journal. That’s how science works. Political spin does not, but science does.

What about El Nino??
That’s not responsible either, but it didn’t stop McLean et.al from getting their paper published and turning themselves into the laughing stock of the science world this month. Need a laugh? Read all about it HERE.

Last, but not least, is the myth of bad data. This is a real favorite of the number one denial blogger. He claimed that NOAA’s weather stations were all badly placed and the data could not be trusted! Only a hundred or so out of thousands are any good he claimed, therefore we cannot trust it!

NOAA ran the data with the stations that he found acceptable and guess what? We have warmed more than we thought. Not less. The difference was incredibly minor. You can read more about this comical episode HERE.

While we’re going through the list of myths, let’s not forget that all time favorite the urban heat island effect!

If you want to discredit a hundred years of climate science based on this, then please tell Dr. Tom Karl the head of the National Climate Data Center (and President of the AMS) why he is wrong when he says the cities of the world cause us to be only a few thousandths of a degree warmer.

That’s three orders of magnitude less than the 0.8C warming we have experienced!! Also explain to him why he is wrong when he runs just the rural stations and and gets the same warming??

You also might explain why if it IS the cities, how come the oceans are all warming too??

Karl and other took the time  to do the math and write it up and submit to a peer reviewed journal. If he is wrong, you need to do the same. Neil Degrasse Tyson said “The laws of physics are real, everything else is just politics.

Show us the science. We are all waiting.

So we are left with the giant conspiracy to prevent the truth from being published. The claim is thousands of scientists around the world are all working together to prevent the “truth” from being published.

The great thing about a conspiracy is this. If someone proves it wrong, you can just claim the proof is part of the conspiracy! Every newsroom gets these conspiracy calls every day. Castro shot Kennedy, Area 51, contrails are really chemical mind control, etc. News folks just call them nutters. Twenty people can’t  keep a secret, much less thousands. Get real.

So there we have it.

No serious peer reviewed journal has published anything that put a serious dent in the current understanding of climate in years now. The evidence is not just overwhelming now. It’s a mountain. I couldn’t go through every argument, but John Cook, who studied solar physics at the Univ. of Queensland down in OZ, runs a great web site that explains the real science behind these myths.

Scientists are taught to be skeptics. Show us the data. Being skeptical is good scientific practice but ignoring a mountain of evidence while giving credit to claims in political journals instead is not scientific skepticism.

It’s politics.

This is why I am not afraid to talk about climate change. I think I’m obligated to do so when there is overwhelming evidence we are tampering with the very air conditioner of our planet.

I have all the world’s major scientific organizations backing me up as well.

Richard Feynman was right. “Science is what we do to keep from lying to ourselves”.

Dan

I’ve seen quite a few Raob launches over the years. RAOB stands for Rawinsonde Observation. You can think of them as weather balloons. They are vital for making forecasts. We live in an atmosphere over 100 km thick, but most weather happens in the troposphere, the bottom 15 km or so.

To forecast weather knowing only what is happening at the ground would be like guessing the outcome of a suspense novel after reading one chapter. OK, well my wife would get it, but the rest of us probably not. These atmospheric “soundings” are not cheap, but twice a day, every day of the year, they are sent up.

They rise from a hundred different countries and the data is shared among all. Politics aside.

So here is the launch of the RAOB at station 89007. A VERY remote station that is among the most expensive to maintain. Thanks to Meteorologist Tim Markle for letting us tag along!

Note from Dan: The linked HD video was crashing too many browsers, so above is the You Tube version. You can right click on the video and watch it in 720P on YouTube!