Posted on 04/24/2010 12:16:15 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
When this extraordinary event began, it was greeted as an example of nature in the raw, creating conditions beyond the control of man. Furthermore, it was widely accepted that anything that compromised the safety of air travel had to be treated with the utmost seriousness. Few doubted the wisdom of grounding all planes. Now, though, questions are being asked about the scientific reasoning behind such drastic action.
The decision was based on a computer model operated by the Meteorological Office's Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre, which suggested there was a cloud of ash covering northern Europe. This prompted a warning from the Met Office, which triggered the wider European ban, via Eurocontrol, the Brussels-based air traffic control centre. However, the model is no more than that - a mathematical model. There was no empirical evidence to back up its findings. Yesterday, the European Commission suggested that the American method of dealing with such episodes, whereby airlines decide whether to fly based on facts and supported by risk assessment, might offer a better approach.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
‘Yesterday, the European Commission suggested that the American method of dealing with such episodes,”
Wait a minute, I thought Europe was perfect???
I do computer modeling for a living. I think it is hilarious how the more removed people get from the actual work and technical knowledge the more confident they get. Liberal Arts bureaucrats love models and treat them as infallible just because “the computer said so”. Actual modelers (the honest ones) are always the first to show defectiveness in the model.
************************************EXCERPT********************************
Der Spiegel examines the chain of events that led to the cancellation of 17,000 flights over Europe, including the diversion of medevacs from Afghanistan and rerouting of the German Chancellor’s flight home. Ash clouds from an Icelandic volcano disrupted flights all over Europe. The question is whether the policy makers over-reacted to the thread. As volcanoes go Eyjafjallajökull was accounted by Icelandic volcanologists as “a weary old man”. It’s recent eruption was unremarkable.
Ash from the volcano’s plume has reached an altitude of only about 10 kilometers (six miles), not high enough to reach the stratosphere … images taken by the Eumetsat satellite … concluded that Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull has spewed 2,000 tons of sulphur dioxide into the air. Pinatubo spouted 10,000 times that amount.
These facts are clear in hindsight. But when the eruption was first reported it triggered a series of remarkable precautionary events driven by predictions from the British meteorology office’s supercomputer. The Telegraph explains how that prediction cascaded through the European bureaucracy.
The decision was based on a computer model operated by the Meteorological Office’s Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre, which suggested there was a cloud of ash covering northern Europe. This prompted a warning from the Met Office, which triggered the wider European ban, via Eurocontrol, the Brussels-based air traffic control centre.
Once the estimate was taken as the best available knowledge, the shutdown of the air transportation system mirrored the spread of the alarm through the system. A cloud of information — whether right or wrong we will examine in a moment — drifted like a virtual ashfall across the continent’s airports. Spiegel takes up the story.
It all began midday on Wednesday, when a telephone rang in Exeter, southern England. Icelandic meteorologists were calling to inform their British colleagues at the Met Office, the United Kingdom’s national weather service, that Eyjafjallajökull was spouting ash and a cloud of volcanic dust was blowing eastward from Iceland. …
The meteorologists immediately put their supercomputer on the job, feeding it measurement data, weather forecasts and satellite images. Fifteen minutes later, they had their first forecast of how the dust cloud would probably spread. A warning was sent out to airlines at 2 p.m., long before the cloud reached the European continent…. On Thursday morning, air traffic authorities closed Scottish airspace. Shortly afterward, the skies above London also experienced a state of quiet such as the city hadn’t known in decades.
By the time the dust settled that single “weary old man” of a volcano had accomplished what all the terrorists in the world had failed to do. The director of Germany’s Cologne-Bonn airport said he had never seen anything like it, even on September 11.
Heathrow, Paris, Frankfurt, Schiphol and all of Europe’s other major hubs came to a standstill on Friday afternoon. Airlines canceled 17,000 flights, while Frankfurt and Amsterdam airports set up thousands of camp beds. Losses for airlines are estimated at up to a billion dollars.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel was forced to interrupt her flight home from a visit to the US, landing in Lisbon instead. A Medevac Airbus air ambulance carrying injured German soldiers home from Afghanistan only made it as far as Istanbul.
The military historian Max Hastings wrote that “the great volcanic shutdown was the price we pay for a society that overreacts to any risk”. Hastings argued that societies had forgotten the concept of accepting risk. An accident, no matter how statistically insignificant, could be magnified by press coverage into a Grecian tragedy. The result was that many systems, including those which were unprecedentedly safe, spent huge marginal costs to attain the last word in perfection.
But perhaps risk is the wrong word. Tradeoffs only apply when choosing between outcomes governed by probabilities that are well known. We trade off a certain number of fatal reactions to vaccines because more lives are saved by its use than are lost thereby. But what if we don’t know the probabilities? What if we can’t know the probabilities? This describes the worst examples of over-reaction which Hastings cites, where public policy is made on the basis of estimates, projections or models which are so inaccurate as to be meaningless. Hastings cites fiascos which are less failures to assess risk than to recognize uncertainty:
In 1988, health minister Edwina Currie almost destroyed Britain’s egg industry when she said that salmonella in eggs might cause a human catastrophe – only for it to be later discovered that salmonella could not get into eggs.
In 1996, Britain spent £7 billion killing millions of the nation’s cows in response to the alleged threat of CJD killing humans eating burgers made from cattle infected by BSE. We now know that the likelihood of this was almost infinitesimally slight.
In 2009, the government spent £1 billion on unneeded vaccines against swine flu, which we were told might kill half a million people. The SARS virus, said some ‘experts’, could prove more devastating to humanity than Aids. It was once suggested that bird flu might kill 150 million people worldwide.
Gosh, reminds me of GW.
Just climate “scientists” and their worthless models that ignore the empirical facts costing billion$. Gee, where have we seen that before? Can we say, “The ENTIRE AGW scam”? Except in that case, it’s TRILLION$.
My motivation in posting this....
There may be a lesson in here somewhere....
If so, then what about the Finnish F-16s with all their engines clogged up irreparably from flying through the ash clouds? They even had pictures of it, online.
Washington under the Obama administration seems to believe that....they gave us Obamacare.
All the election models I see show that the dems will lose big time in November. I therefore deem that the dems should cease and desist right now.
“...There was no empirical evidence to back up its findings....”
Hmmmm, heard this somewhere else.
Thinking, thinking...
Oh yea, global “warming” simulations.
I always remember the joke I heard in grad school, “Never let bad data ruin a good dissertation.”
Our global warming F students let bad data make a bad dissertation even worse.
Government elites were all for using computer climate models as long as they brought government more reasons to raise taxes and destroy personal liberty. Now that faulty computer models have brought them travel misery and cost government money they are suddenly discovered to be a bad thing.
Strange how that works.
Although I too am tired of mathematical models replacing empirical evidence, the fact is that it was an emergency that needed to be handled immediately.
The ash doesn’t just clog engines, it wears the surfaces and bearings to the point that they will fail. I think they did a good job.
In america we use a system much the same as the one we have been looking at. I have tried to find the particulars but could not.
Locally, we can monitor the estimated movements of airborne chemical spills based on available meteorological data and projections. The data is used to alert emergency agencies to the potential and to indicate what areas should be evacuated and where services by such as Red Cross and Hazmet teams might be most needed. The maps are generated on computers from all available data.
It seems to me that to bash the policies and procedures followed in Europe is naive. The assumption is that someone in an airplane could explore the total area between Iceland and Europe taking samples at all altitudes an grid points. Such a thought is just plain stupid. A model is an estimated extrapolation of known data plotted on a computer.
Meteorologists use it every day. The Normandy invasion was delayed one day and then went forward on just such a model extrapolation.
Totally agree.
People have to make a decisions with imperfect information and no past history to guide them. Everyone feels free to come in when all the facts are in and say how they made the wrong decision.
The facts are; no planes went down and no one died.
Next time they will have the luxury of last weeks events to make better decisions and cause less disruption.
What would people say if a plane would have come into Heathrow with the last engine flaming out (due to ash ingestion) and crashed short of the runway?
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