Winds, plumes, travel and the Iceland volcano is not predictable

Following an increase in the ash clouds generated by the volcano at Eyjafjallajokull NATS has issued the following statement for today:

The situation regarding the volcanic eruption in Iceland remains dynamic and the latest information from the Met Office shows that the situation today will continue to be variable.

Based on the latest Met Office information, part of Scottish airspace including Aberdeen, Inverness and Edinburgh airports will continue to be available from 1300-1900 today, and also south to Newcastle Airport. Restrictions will remain in place over the rest of UK airspace below 20,000ft.

Overnight the CAA, in line with new guidance from the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) decided flights above the ash cloud will be permitted in the UK; between 1300-1900 this will enable aircraft movements above 20,000ft in UK airspace.

The Met Office, whose models of the ash cloud have come under criticism has responded by noting

The Met Office uses multiple dispersion models endorsed by the international meteorological community. The output from the Met Office volcanic ash dispersion model has been compared with our neighbouring VAACs in Canada and France since the beginning of this incident and the results are consistent.

Our models are confirmed by observations which have seen ash in the UK and south of England. These include:
• Met Office and NERC aircraft have observed volcanic ash in UK airspace at varying heights.
• Multiple land observations have recorded ash in the skies across the UK, including across southern Britain.
• Balloon observations have shown a 600 m deep ash cloud at an altitude of 4 km across parts of the UK.

NATO F16 fighter jets have reported engine damage, due to volcanic ash when flying through European airspace.

And given that there is some blame now being tossed around the main stream media, as well as some blogs, on who made what decision they go on to point out

It is for the aviation industry and regulator to set thresholds for safe ash ingestion. Currently, world-wide advice from ICAO is based on engine and airframe manufacturers stating a zero tolerance to ash ingestion. This means that aircraft should not be exposed to any volcanic ash.

Eurocontrol is trying to get this restriction eased, with the support of some airlines to:

A proposal by Eurocontrol, the intergovernmental air traffic body, to European transport ministers suggested the implementation of a no-fly zone limited to the visible ash plume as determined by satellite images and adequate buffer areas which could be updated on a six-hour basis.

The current map of the ash that the Met Office has produced shows that there is a way of getting from the US to the UK without going through the cloud, but only as far south as Newcastle. There are moves to do a better job on predicting where these flight paths would be. While planes can now fly over the UK, it is getting down through the space below 20,000 ft that contains the ash that is the problem, and you have to do that if you are landing or taking off.


But it also shows how the ash has put a barrier between Northern and Southern Europe.

After the height of the cloud being produced had reduced over the past few days, there was hope that it was not getting high enough into the atmosphere to reach Europe (i.e. below 3 miles). The latest outburst, however, put more material higher into the atmosphere strengthening the cloud once more.

I wrote yesterday about the size of the particles, and why those that are in the 50 – 100 micron range are particularly dangerous as abrasive cutting threats to aircraft. Smaller particle sizes, around 5 microns, are the greater personal threat, since these very small yet sharp particles can be breathed into the lungs and do damage, both chemically and mechanically. Larger particles fall out of the cloud fairly rapidly but the smaller particles, which are formed both from the contact of the molten lava with water and ice (which causes it to shatter) and from the bursting of bubbles of gas that are being emitted within the molten rock, and burst as it reaches the surface, are the ones carried higher both by the relative heat of the plume, but also by the prevailing winds.

Part of the problem that is sustaining the cloud has been the warm weather with a fairly steady wind direction although this is swinging south, with the predictions through Friday suggesting that the cloud may intensify while narrowing. There is some hope that an increase in wind speed could displace and disperse the ash already over parts of Europe confining the restricted zones (which sadly seem likely to include the airports of the south of England) to a narrower band. The projected path of the wind does seem to vary with forecasters, this is from Accuweather, which has the cloud sweeping back north over Scotland, and moving away from the southern airports, while the Met Office view (above) has the cloud further South and covering them.

Projected Ash Cloud path (Accuweather)

Winds at the level of the ash plume are also expected to become more aligned Tuesday into Wednesday, which may result in the ash plume becoming more concentrated and posing a greater threat to air travel. This, of course, is assuming the volcano continues to erupt through then.

On a positive note, AccuWeather.com meteorologists expect this greater alignment of the winds to cause the ash plume to become narrower and affect a smaller area.

Looking at American Airlines policy for future travelers, while the notice says:

Due to the ash plume from the volcano that erupted in Iceland, some of American Airlines operations have been disrupted. Ticketed customers whose flights have been cancelled are being re-accommodated on other American Airlines flights with available seats. If a customer whose flight has been cancelled decides to cancel or reschedule their trip instead of continuing travel, that customer is eligible for a refund on any unused portion of their ticket.

In addition, American offers customers whose flights have not been canceled, but who are traveling to or from the impacted areas in the next several days, the convenience to change their plans. Ticketed customers may change flights as shown below, without incurring a charge for changing their tickets.

In essence the “shown below” says that passengers who booked flights before April 16th, and who plan to fly between the 16th (when this started) and the 22nd (Thursday) can change tickets without penalty only if they rebook their flight to occur before May 3rd. Part of the problem with that is of course no-one knows how long this will go on, and in my own case I have to be back here by a certain date, and so am a bit restricted in my options. (Oh, and they only allow one re-booking).

The Met Office, NASA GISS and is there a Thermometergate?

Because there are very obvious current differences between the weather in the United Kingdom and the forecasts of the Met Office, the BBC are reporting that the some at the Office are considering stopping the practice of making long-term forecasts. One of the problems has been identified:

The Met Office has now admitted to BBC News that its annual global mean forecast predicted temperatures higher than actual temperatures for nine years out of the last 10.

The bias is very small overall, about 0.05 degrees C, but the fact that it is a persistent warming bias should, perhaps, be of concern, relative to the accuracy of the models using it. Of course there are those, such as Professor Mobbs at Leeds, who would argue differently:

"All models have biases and these are very small. It may be, as the Met Office suggests, that the observations are wrong, not the model."

Must be all that illusion of snow that must be confusing folk in the UK after the model promised a greater chance of a warm winter.

Thermometergate, the concern over the quiet, and at the time un-noticed switch whereby the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) changed number of stations used in assessing global temperature, is slowly getting more visibility. There was an hour long special (visible in five parts) on KUSI in which (during part 4) John Coleman introduced and talked with E. Michael Smith, who runs the site that has reported on this, and which has reviewed the GISS code and discovered that they now rely on a much smaller number of data acquisition sites than they have previously.

One final note: There has been A Great Dying lately for thermometers. Since about 1990, there has been a reduction in thermometer counts globally. In the USA, the number has dropped from 1850 at peak (in the year 1968) to 136 now (in the year 2009). As you might guess, this has presented some “issues” for our thermal quilt. But do not fear, GIStemp will fill in what it needs, guessing as needed, stretching and fabricating until it has a result.

Going through the list of stations that survive and looking for those in Missouri, there are apparently three:
(the first and second sets of numbers after the station name give the latitude and longitude of the stations)

42572434000 ST.LOUIS/LAMB 38.75 -90.37

42572445000 COLUMBIA/REGI 38.82 -92.22

42572440000 SPRINGFIELD/M 37.23 -93.38 .

Going to the actual GISS site to see how the values check out, GISS does recognize the drop in the number of station records that are used:

Number of stations used to generate the GISS temperature record

The full list of Missouri stations (there are 35 of them) are also given. The relevant plots given are:

Lambert St Louis temperatures

Columbia MO temperatures

Springfield Mo temperatures

The consistent part of which plots seem to be the lack of current evidence of warming and the higher temperatures during the dust bowl era. I also looked at the University site in about the middle of the state (at Rolla) and got this:

Temperatures at Missouri University of Science & Technology (until recently UMR)

One thing that did strike me about that record was that it did not look the same as the plot that I got from the USHCN data base, and which I had used once before. So I went and got that plot for Rolla:

Plot of the Mean Rolla Temperatures from the United States Historical Climate Network (USHCN) data base.

The impression of a rising trend evident in the GISS plot is not as evident in this one, and the highest temperature is barely, rather than clearly, 2006.

What is, however, odd, is that the USHCN data base for Missouri does not carry the station data for the three sites chosen by GISS.

I am going to continue to monitor the Rolla site, since (apropos Anthony Watts project on the validity of station data there has been an new technical addition near the measuring station and it will be interesting to see what, if any, effect the wind turbine has on the data generated from the weather station.

Current status of the station at Missouri University of Science and Technology (note the wind turbine on the right, and the weather station on the left).

The debate over the impact of the reduction in the number of sites that are being used to generate global temperature averages will no doubt continue, though it is interesting to note the specifics of what Dr. Hansen has said in his response to the KUSI report.

“NASA has not been involved in any manipulation of climate data used in the annual GISS global temperature analysis. The analysis utilizes three independent data sources provided by other agencies. Quality control checks are regularly performed on that data. The analysis methodology as well as updates to the analysis are publicly available on our website. The agency is confident of the quality of this data and stands by previous scientifically based conclusions regarding global temperatures.”

Now NASA (GISS) recognized that there has been a reduction in the number of monitoring stations (it is after all their graph that I used above) what it does not do is comment on the impact that changing the data base has on the overall result.

We will see how long it takes to getting around to addressing that issue.

Climategate becomes more visible, data is analyzed

Slowly but surely greater attention is being given to the potential scandal that has acquired the “Climategate” label. There are 28.5 million results when I just typed that key word into Google. While the story was first carried in such news sources as Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and the British Daily Telegraph it has only been much more recently that it has been recognized by others in the MSM. And while CNN is carrying the topic it appears to be slanting the coverage towards the AGW crowd.

This is not uncommon. For example on Friday there was a short mention of the topic on NBC though still doubting its significance. And analysis of the code by an expert was showing the existence of problems that has finally caught the BBC’s attention. Should you watch the BBC piece you might note that while the programmer highlights the words “fudge factor” on the screen, the reporter does not really cover what that means. Yet magazines such as Newsweek continue to offer apologia, rather than asking hard questions, and Nature, instead of explaining exactly how many folks reviewed papers on climate change topics, and whether the cartel really had the power the e-mails claimed to restrict papers, also defended their position editorially, raising the clear possibility that the reputation and integrity of one of the greater journals in science has been compromised.

And after being caught by Jon Stewart it has now reached the front page of the Washington Post (though it seemed to fall off the front page of the Internet edition rather fast).

Interestingly, however, one can pick up by the focus of the comments where the writers of the pieces are coming from. For example, with the Washington Post piece, it is accompanied by a side bar that shows the following graph:

The WAPO comment above the curve was “However, nine of the world’s hottest years have occurred this decade,” which the graph then illustrates.


Unfortunately this statement while obviously absolutely untrue, (there are a number of periods in the geological past that were significantly warmer) even in the context meant (likely that of the last say 2,000 years) is almost certainly wrong, and one of the underlying points revealed in the e-mails is that folk such as Dr Michael Mann appear to have known this. (It was apparently he who first came up with the trick of replacing the data from tree rings, which were starting to show an apparent decline in temperature, while the temperature was actually going up, with real temperature data.) Now there are several issues with this change that folk need to be aware of.

The first, and obvious one, is that if the proxy that is being relied on to predict temperature is not correctly recording temperature change, then the use of the proxy has to be questioned. If the folk who used it do not publically admit to this, then it is reasonable to raise a question both concerning their personal integrity and that of the published papers that they have generated. (Given the cross-exchange of e-mails it also brings others into this collusion to conceal information).

The second point is the one that scientists get fascinated with, and that is why did the proxy data stop being accurate? And one possible answer has been provided by Craig Loehle. To simplify his argument, he points out that the width of tree rings – assumed to be linearly related to temperature – will also be affected by other factors. For example it is not unreasonable to assume that, as temperatures rise above a certain point, that there will be less moisture in the soil, and thus the tree will increasingly suffer, rather than increasing to prosper. If such a case is so, above a certain temperature, then (as the data being used by Briffa showed the tree rings would start to shrink.

Proxy temperatures as predicted by tree-ring data as plotted by Steve McInyre from Briffa data.

Notice that, for the first time in the record the temperature rises above the zero line in about 1930. And then crosses it again in 1960, with the onset of the red part of the curve – which is the decline that has been deleted from the plot). If one looks at a recent Met Office plot of temperature for this period:

Met Office Plot of temperatures. (Sorry I could not get through to the site for a current reference. At present the popularity of the site is causing it to redirect traffic to the UEA announcement page).

One can see that temperatures have risen, at around that time, to lie above the baseline, where Dr. Loehle believes the inflection starts to occur. So that, in his projection, while the temperature continues to rise, the proxy (tree ring) data will fall:

Projection of variation in tree ring data, showing a projected false value for temperature, as increased temperature reduces soil moisture, and thus ring growth (according to Loehle).

The change from the debate about recent temperatures has some relevance, but it becomes much more relevant to the debate over the condition during the Medieval Warming Period. NOAA currently shows this chart, which comes from the 2007 IPCC report.



However what is worth a passing comment is that if one looks at the model predictions of temperature before about 1850 they clearly show that the models overestimate the actual temperatures, and that while the actual instrumented temperatures were showing a Little Ice Age back to 1500, the models and proxy data do not. And if one were to apply the Loehle logic to the data between 1000 and 1150 where some of the models show the temperature crossing the zero line, then one could project that within that period the temperature could be higher than projected.

The tree ring data came from the Western United States for that time period has been a critical part of the debate on the validity of the original Mann, Bradley and Hughes paper. But we know from Scott Stein’s work that the western United States went through two severe drought periods :

“We now have compelling proof,” says Stine, “that Owens Lake dried up and became a desert playa in the early medieval period. The finding has ominous implications for the future security of Los Angeles' water supply.”

Two years ago, Stine caused a sensation in the science press with his claim that California had endured two epic droughts in the Middle Ages, one of 220 years (from 892 to 1112) and the other of 140 years (from 1209 to 1350). By contrast, the most severe recent drought— which created an unprecedented statewide water emergency— lasted only six years, from 1987 to 1992.

Stine's primary evidence, now broadly accepted, consists of ancient tree stumps that were exposed to view when the 1980s drought and DWP greed reduced water levels by more than 50 feet in Mono Lake (the northernmost catchment of the Los Angeles Aqueduct) and other Sierran lakes and streams.

I would guess that the severity of a drought of that duration would, as Dr. Loehle has pointed out, be enough to narrow the tree rings of the time. Perhaps now we might get a little more investigation of this point?

The point is now being caught by some of the reporters that are actually bothering to dig into the data, and so, for example, Christopher Booker who brings a different interpretation to the story that I have tried to tell in the above. But it goes back to the reliance of the Global Climate Models (GCM) on too little data as I explained in an earlier post back in October.

It is also sad to note a comment in the London Times coverage of the decision of the British Met Office to re-create all the data.

The Met Office plans to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by leaked e-mails.

But

The Government is attempting to stop the Met Office from carrying out the re-examination, arguing that it would be seized upon by climate change sceptics.

They have got to be kidding !! Even Al Gore knows when he has a problem.