Ensemble Modeling of Air Pollution Due to April 2010 Island Volcano Eruption

Abstract

The eruption of Island volcano in April 2010 caused enormously big troubles for air transport over Europe for a long period of time. The losses and inconveniences for air companies, common business and usual passengers are difficult to be estimated but in any case are rather considerable. The insights from this extraordinary event are that serious efforts must be put in studding not only the volcanic events but in creating tools for reliable forecast of volcano products (mainly ash) distribution in case of eruption. There are few centers devoted to observation and forecast of such events. Some meteorological services lately created respective systems. The ENSEMBLE consortium leaded by European JRC in Ispra, Italy, which is aimed at elaborating ensemble forecast on the base of individual forecasts of almost all European Early Warning Systems (EWS) in case of nuclear accident decided to launch a series of exercises devoted to simulation of the first week air pollution dilution caused by Island volcano eruption. Bulgarian ERS (BERS) was upgraded as to be able to take part in these exercises and its results and comparisons with other model results are the object of this work. © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014.