Article Tags: Front Page News, Headline Story, Met Office, Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre
The airport chaos that hit tens of thousands of travellers yesterday was based on a faulty ash cloud prediction.
Officials closed south-eastern airspace for ten hours following a Met Office alert about dangerous levels of ‘black’ ash.
Yet when the forecasters took fresh soundings, and sent up a plane to check, they found their assessment was flawed: there was no such ash.
So how did they get it so wrong? By DAVID DERBYSHIRE
The decision to close the airspace over southern England was based on the word of an inaccurate Met Office computer.
It led again to angry complaints that airspace bans are based on theoretical models – rather than real-time.
The final word on whether to close UK airspace is made by officials at the Civil Aviation Authority. In turn, they rely on forecasts of the size, density and location of the Icelandic ash cloud provided by the Met Office’s volcanic ash advisory centre in Exeter.
There, a team of ten – including only one forecaster – work around the clock to monitor the movement of the ash cloud and run a computer model called NAME III.
Source: dailymail.co.uk