Scientists Find Way to Predict Heights of Volcanic Ash Clouds
Data gathered on peaks can help scientists estimate and track plume heights.
Volcanoes can be unpredictable beasts, threatening not only people living nearby but aircraft flying over and downwind of their ash plumes.
An eight-day-long eruption on Iceland in May 2011 sent a blast of ash--what scientists call tiny flecks of fractured rock--20 kilometers into the sky, closing airspace downwind and cancelling hundreds of flights for four days during the eruption.
A new study of data gathered from the eruption of that Icelandic peak suggests that scientists might be able to better predict the onset of an impending eruption—and, for the first time, estimate the height of the resulting ash plume—if the right sensors are installed on a rumbling volcano.
Weeks before the
