Monitoring the Eyjafjallajökull Ash Cloud

Monday, 19 April, 2010

Plenty of Eyjafjallajökull stuff in the blogs at the moment (not surprisingly!) so I thought I would compile a few remote sensing bits together:

MODIS RapidFire had one of the earlier sets of imagery of the ash cloud as it spread out over Europe. The high spatial resolution and twice a day imaging makes it very good for this type of stuff.

Robert Peston provides a nice summary. Couple of nice quotes: “[This] shows that the issue isn’t whether the cloud is real and dangerous - but whether its extent can be accurately mapped.” Spatial extent is clearly the most important, but vertical mixing is rapidly becoming a key issue. And, of course:

“Right now, the biggest impact for business is the sheer number of executives who are stuck abroad, unable to come home. ‘The real danger for them is that we’ll discover we don’t really need them,’ one business leader joked.” Nice touch!

The Map Room have taken an animated GIF of the spread of the ash cloud as produce by the Norwegian Met Office and put it on YouTube.

Lidar News has covered how Doppler LiDAR is being used to determine vertical extent.

A nice series of images over at Earth Observatory

So, plenty going on in the remote sensing world.

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