There was a spokesman (NATS/CAA?) on BBC this morning, who said that no European passenger jet flights had taken place in the ‘red’ zones plotted by the Met Office advice, i.e. everyone in the world used the same ‘safe’ limits and rules for the probable concentrations, locations and altitudes of ash.
Who has said that the UK Met Office modelling has been found suspect? I would imagine the modellers would run scores of different model runs, using Newtons equations, but they would change small variables slightly. This would give them lots of different scenarios for the same initial set of elements (if you know anything about the chaos theory…), and they would compare them all, and come up with a best fit. This would then be compared to various models run by other countries, to come up with their very best advice to NATS and CAA.
As I said before, only time will furnish the cost of running jet engines through even minute amounts of acidic and corrosive ash, and just because we have a reprieve at the moment, doesn’t mean that it is over. The last time the same volcano kicked off, the eruptions lasted three years…
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