Blue Skies

Sun 25 Apr 2010, 23:31

Yes indeed it was remarkable how adapted we have become to seeing skies through a high altitude condensation haze as being "blue" although the hue of the skies and clouds reminded me of the Niagara Peninsula as a boy when the prevailing southwesterly winds brought up all the dust from ploughing or reaping on the Great Plains at different times of the spring and autumn. Took me a while to remember where I had seen skies quite "that" colour quality and then I realised it was my childhood in Canada. Did anyone else notice the ash fall that hit Charlbury on Monday/tuesday night, quite evident on the car windscreens and dustbin lids - dust had a gritty feel to it and a smell quite different to the normal dust that accumulates. And this was just a little volcano - makes one realise just how vulnerable our modern world logistic systems are when dependent upon aircraft, and that we knew before nothing in scientific or engineering terms about glassified ash and its effect upon modern turbine engines apart from the terrifying 1982 and 1989 incidents when large aircraft effectively dropped out of the sky but for a near miracle that restarted some of their engines. We aren't out of the woods yet - the volcano continues to erupt and could do so for years and if nearby Katla follows its normal course and does so too ... and then we get a stable high pressure from the climate change related shift of the high pressure zones and jetstream northwards, well then... we could see ash levels at more than 0.02g/second into an engine that has been determined safe, being exceeded, and the whole chaos occurs again! There were only 2 aircraft in Europe equipped to detect particulate matter in the atmosphere like this from what I heard and that is an indictment on all governments for lack of attention and funding - its not as if europe and the near north is short of volcanoes any one of which could blanket the hemisphere in ejecta! So now we have some data to work upon and I consider it a government priority to do more work in this area as we can expect this sort of thing within historical timescales. Vesuvius is well overdue...