Alison Black and Matthew Lickiss accompanied colleagues Kelsey Mulder, Andrew Charlton-Perez and Rachel McCloy, from the University of Reading’s Meteorology and Psychology Departments to a workshop on Volcanic Ash Forecasting at the Royal Academy of Engineering. This was part of CIDR’s collaboration on a multidisciplinary research project, RACER, on the communication of the risk and and uncertainty of extreme weather events.
Those who remember the Eyjafjallajökull eruption in 2010 might imagine that both government and the airline industry are keen to have better tools to measure and predict the presence of ash in order to safely manage the impact of future eruptions on air travel.
During the workshop we ran a small study (see illustration), looking at professionals’ responses to some of the different representations of volcanic ash distribution that are available currently. Some of the data from this study are to be presented at the European Geosciences Union 2016 General Assembly in April.
More details of the workshop’s findings can be found here.