Glidemet

The eruption in southern Iceland occurred early on Wednesday morning, around 8am. The first Volcanic Ash Advisories were issued early Wednesday afternoon. Overnight into Thursday UK airports progressively closed southwards as the ash plume spread south, with UK airspace within the forecast ash area closing to IFR traffic at noon on Thursday.

I honestly don’t know what the effect of ash on piston-powered aircraft is (looking into it though), but these are the Volcanic Ash Advisories being issued by the Met Office (the nominated Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre for the North East Atlantic area). They update every six hours or so. They’re also available in text form with co-ordinates for the edges of the affected areas.

Users will also want to consult NOTAMs for this event. They will refer to the ash advisory messages — these are what I have linked to above. However at time of posting the latest NOTAM follows:

Q) EGXX/QAFXX/IV/NBO/E/000/999/5441N00219W999
B) FROM: 10/04/15 12:00C) TO: 10/04/15 17:59

E) A VOLCANIC ASH CLOUD, ORIGINATING IN ICELAND, IS HAVING A
MAJOR IMPACT AFFECTING UK AIRSPACE. UK AREA AFFECTED:
610000N 0100000W 610000N 0000000W 600000N 0000000W
570000N 0050000E 550000N 0050000E 503039N 0013824E
493000N 0041900W 493957N 0080000W 510000N 0080000W
522000N 0053000W 535324N 0053000W 553600N 0020800W
574700N 0015500W 604402N 0100000W 610000N 0100000W
SFC/UNL
OPR SHOULD REFER TO VA ADVISORY 20100415/0600 FOR FURTHER INFO.
IN ACCORDANCE WITH ICAO VOLCANIC ASH CONTINGENCY PLAN,
NO IFR CLEARANCE WILL BE ISSUED FOR PENETRATION OF THE FORECAST
CONTAMINATED AREA THAT LIES WITHIN UK AIRSPACE.

Do not use the above information for flight planning etc. — check the latest NOTAMs yourself.

Here’s a bit of video of the eruption filmed from the air yesterday morning.

Here is the Meteosat Ash Detection imagery for Iceland, where you can may see something of the progress of the ash in real-time, but you’ll need read the ash imagery interpretation guide (Powerpoint file) to understand what you’re looking at, and colour-vision better than mine. The ash is not that dense over the UK, and there’s a lot of high-level cirrus in the area which is contaminating the images somewhat.

You won’t see the ash (away from the volcano itself) on normal satellite images such as high-res visible, or infra-red. It’s too thin when viewed top-down as much as anything. The above linked images look for the exact signature of volcanic ash and sulphur dioxide (which is, reportedly, being smelt in the Shetlands!).

However, for your viewing pleasure, this is what the eruption looked like at lunch time on Wednesday (courtesy the Icelandic Met Office, NOAA, and EUMETSAT):

For what it’s worth the upper-level winds will be bringing air from Iceland for several days yet, so how long this situation continues is entirely dependent on how long the eruption in Iceland lasts.

Finally, here is the very detailed ICAO Aviation Manual on Ash (and other stuff) (pdf).

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