Dr. Jeff Masters' WunderBlog

Patrap, thanks for the info.

Based on model winds, that volcano is spewing ash upwards of 50000 feet at least, in order to get the plume to move WNW like that.

In this sat picture you can see the plume clearly on the right side just above the horn. My best guess is that the plume is about 350 km now.

Quoting TropicalAnalystwx13:

Definitely got low to mid level circ going on. Upper level winds pushing off building tops though. Interesting little feature, particularly position. Waters barely sustainable, if at all. Don't see much low-level flow.

Quoting Levi32:
Based on model winds, that volcano is spewing ash upwards of 50000 feet at least, in order to get the plume to move WNW like that.

If its blowing ash 50,000 ft in to the air on the scale of that sat images then this must be a massive explosive eruption.
This might cause all sorts of problems for air transport and more in your field, that amount of particles in the upper atmosphere must influence tropical weather quite a bit at least in the Africa area.

Quoting Levi32:
Based on model winds, that volcano is spewing ash upwards of 50000 feet at least, in order to get the plume to move WNW like that.

Grimsvotn's eruption earlier this year managed around 65,000 ft.

Quoting PcolaDan:
In this sat picture you can see the plume clearly on the right side just above the horn. My best guess is that the plume is about 350 km now.

350km? Enough to blast the ISS outta space? That would really be the end of the days.

Maybe not quite that high...

Quoting Cotillion:


Grimsvotn's eruption earlier this year managed around 65,000 ft.



350km? Enough to blast the ISS outta space? That would really be the end of the days.

Maybe not quite that high...

I think he meant 35km.

Quoting Cotillion:


Grimsvotn's eruption earlier this year managed around 65,000 ft.



350km? Enough to blast the ISS outta space? That would really be the end of the days.

Maybe not quite that high...

That's horizontal distance.

Quoting Levi32:


The idea is to think of a "parcel" of sinking air, as it's easier to think of a small chunk of air than the entire airmass. That chunk of air shrinks in size as it sinks, like a snowball, if that's not a terrible analogy.

very simple explanation and much appreciated
thank you

A possible volcanic eruption in the Horn of Africa? 2011 has already had eruptions in Chile and Iceland, as well as droughts, flooding, earthquakes, wildfires, tsunamis, etc. in other places accross the world.

Quoting AstroHurricane001:


That's horizontal distance.

sorry was off researching

yes surface miles NOT altitude LOL

Quoting Levi32:
The 18z GFS is once again displaying a magnificent-looking 200mb high with great outflow jets around it centered over the Yucatan Peninsula by Day 12. This kind of a setup needs to be watched very closely, for if it comes to fruition, we will likely have an Arlene to worry about.

Do you know what the GFS is advertising, as far as shear goes, around that time frame?

Quoting TropicalAnalystwx13:


Do you know what the GFS is advertising, as far as shear goes, around that time frame?

Underneath that high, nearly zero.

UPDATE 23:46 UTC : We are now convinced that the erupting volcano is the Nabro volcano (an official confirmation is still missing)
UPDATE 23:16 UTC : As long as we have no confirmation of local authorities we have to guess on the name of the erupting volcano. Dubbi volcano is one scenario as his activity could be traced to 1861. Based on the coordinates of the beginning of the eruption as well as the location of a number of the more powerful earthquakes, Pieter De Leeuw (Netherlands) has traced the eruption as probably coming from the Nabro volcano, a crater with a diameter of 8 km. We agree with him. Nabro volcano has no records of recent eruptions.
UPDATE 23:10 UTC : According to Global Volcanism Program, both Nabro and Dubbi belong to the Bidu volcanic complex
UPDATE 22:59 UTC : Earthquake-report.com wants to know as fast as possible the situation in Afambo. The continuous earthquakes may have been damaging and depending the activity of the nearby Dubbi volcano, people in very nearby Afambo are at risk. We hope to receive OK signals soon, but as said earlier on, communications with this part of Eritrea will be very basic and it can take a while before the news reaches the outside world (if not cut off by the ongoing events).
UPDATE 22:45 UTC : This will be a very special volcano eruption because we expect that the eruption comes from the Dubbi volcano who had it’s latest recorded activity in 1861.
UPDATE 22:35 UTC : The following satellite picture clearly indicates that an eruption is going on in the area. Look at the upper right quarter. A point will gradually grow to a major cloud, which means that based on the scale the eruption is very huge.

Quoting PlazaRed:


If its blowing ash 50,000 ft in to the air on the scale of that sat images then this must be a massive explosive eruption.
This might cause all sorts of problems for air transport and more in your field, that amount of particles in the upper atmosphere must influence tropical weather quite a bit at least in the Africa area.

Any effects on the weather patterns there will depend on exactly how big the eruption is, which I guess we won't find out for a little while.

Quoting CybrTeddy:


I think he meant 35km.

The horizontal extent of the ash plume looks to have exceeded 420 km, and may affect the Eritrean capital of Asmara. It is definitely located on the northern flank of the African wave train and can be seen interacting with their winds. This is definitely no ordinary pop-up thunderstorm.

Previous eruptions of the Nabro volcano had debris aimed in a WSW direction toward the present Eritrea-Ethiopia border. A nearby volcano (Mallahle) in Ethiopia holds the community of Aruku, which is located within a caldera.

The Nabro caldera is approximately 7 km (4.3 mi) across.

Closeup view of the ash plume.

Quoting Levi32:


Underneath that high, nearly zero.

Whoa, that would almost certainly give us Arlene if it meandered in the area for while.

It would be monsoonal in nature, I'm assuming?

Just a footnote to everybody's observations above:-
UPDATE 13/06 – 00:15 UTC : This is a very recent Google earth picture (combined with satellite cloud image). The size of the cloud is 150 km on 50 km!.


It's been an interesting night reading all of your comments! Thanks night everybody.

UPDATE 13/06 – 00:15 UTC : This is a very recent Google earth picture (combined with satellite cloud image). The size of the cloud is 150 km on 50 km!.

Quoting TropicalAnalystwx13:


Whoa, that would almost certainly give us Arlene if it meandered in the area for while.

It would be monsoonal in nature, I'm assuming?

Based on that kind of upper configuration I would think so, yes. A moisture invasion from the south. Of course, it's still a ways off.

It is rather intriguing that this volcano, if it is the Nabro stratovolcano, has had no recorded eruptions. That makes it very unpredictable.

Seems no real media outlet has picked up on it as of yet. It erupted just after midnight local time. Eritrea was just in our news yesterday over the release of a few Brits held on 'spying' charges.

Sort of reminds you of Chaiten from a couple of years ago - dormant for near 10,000 years and then erupts.

Smithsonian guesstimates Nabro's last eruption was some point during the Holocene (our current epoch), but that's in italics (underlying the uncertainty) and it covers some 11,700 years.

Mt St Helens eruption, as photographed by NOAA GOES-3 satellite.



Plus 36 min,




12:15 p.m. EDT on May 18, 1980. The ring structure is a cloud of volcanic ash propagating outward from the erupting mountain. The image was obtained 36 minutes after eruption. Click here for high resolution version, which is a large file. Please credit NOAA.)

AU and NZ flights are on hold because of the S American Volcano eruption.... what r the possible impacts from this quite large eruption? Especially considering that it seems the ash plume will be moving downwind towards the ATL....

Quoting Bitmap7:
UPDATE 13/06 – 00:15 UTC : This is a very recent Google earth picture (combined with satellite cloud image). The size of the cloud is 150 km on 50 km!.

That's an old sat picture they have. Google Earth doesn't update as fast as Sat24, which is what I based my estimate on.

Quoting WeatherNerdPR:
A possible volcanic eruption in the Horn of Africa? 2011 has already had eruptions in Chile and Iceland, as well as droughts, flooding, earthquakes, wildfires, tsunamis, etc. in other places accross the world.

yeah no kidding, don't forget tornadoes and record snowfall and snowstorms

Quoting BahaHurican:
AU and NZ flights are on hold because of the S American Volcano eruption.... what r the possible impacts from this quite large eruption? Especially considering that it seems the ash plume will be moving downwind towards the ATL....

Yep, its going to be tough to find a flight out of west Africa in a couple days if this keeps blowing ash
workers trying to fly back might want to prepare for this.

Quoting TropicalAnalystwx13:


Whoa, that would almost certainly give us Arlene if it meandered in the area for while.

It would be monsoonal in nature, I'm assuming?

Let's see ... 12 days out. Hmmmmm.

Quoting bappit:

Let's see ... 12 days out. Hmmmmm.

It's a piece to a puzzle. I've been expressing interest in the last week of June for the western Caribbean and southern Gulf of Mexico region for a while, based on the likelyhood that the MJO will be back over our area of the world by that time, and some of the models have become insistent on an upper ridge ballooning over the region in response. The configuration of that ridge suggests monsoonal invasion into the western Caribbean or Yucatan area.

It is something to watch closely over the next week, as that kind of pattern could breed a noteworthy tropical disturbance.

Volcano. No real news, etc out of the area? considering the time, and the demographics of that area, no surprise.

Quoting blsealevel:


Yep, its going to be tough to find a flight out of west Africa in a couple days if this keeps blowing ash
workers trying to fly back might want to prepare for this.

I'm wondering how far west that plume would be likely to drift.... guess it would depend on the composition thereof. I'm also wondering if a plume of ash making its way into the ATL along with whatever AEWs are propogating Wward would not have an effect similar to that of SAL dust.... pure speculation, of course.

This is one of the few pieces of information I can find on Nabro. Perhaps some of the more scientific minded can explain the size of this volcano, perhaps in relation to the yellowstone caldera?

"Large magnitude silicic volcanism in north Afar: the Nabro Volcanic Range and Ma'alalta volcano
Wiart, Pierre; Oppenheimer, Clive
Bulletin of Volcanology, Volume 67, Issue 2, pp.99-115

Much of the volcanological work carried out in north Afar (Ethiopia and Eritrea) has focused on the nature of Quaternary basaltic volcanic ranges, which have been interpreted by some as incipient oceanic ridges. However, we show here that comparable volumes of silicic magmas have been erupted in the region. In particular, the virtually undocumented Nabro Volcanic Range, which runs NNE for more than 100 km from the margin of the Danakil Depression to the Red Sea coast, has a subaerial volume of the order of 550 km3, comparable to the volume of the much better known Erta’Ale axial volcanic range. Nabro volcano itself forms part of an enigmatic double caldera structure with a neighbouring volcano, Mallahle. The twin caldera may have formed simultaneously with the eruption of between 20 and 100 km3 of ignimbrite, which is readily identified in Landsat Thematic Mapper imagery. This may have been the largest explosive eruption in north Afar, and is certain to have deposited a regionally distributed tephra layer which could in the future be located in distal sections as a stratigraphic marker. An integrated analysis of optical and synthetic aperture radar imagery, digital topographic data, field observations and limited geochemical measurements, permits here descriptions and first order inferences about the structure, stratigraphy and compositions of several major volcanoes of the Afar Triangle, and a reappraisal of their regional significance. "

12 days out is like watching phantoms.

Below you can see how much it has spread in just under 2 hours. Also it shows how I came up with my distance, comparing geographic points. The red dot in the upper left of the first 2 pics is Khartoum, Sudan with population about 5 million. That puts it about 650 km away from the leading edge of the ash, if in fact that is what we are seeing. There is NO confirmed report yet due to time there plus it's isolated spot.

Quoting BahaHurican:
I'm wondering how far west that plume would be likely to drift.... guess it would depend on the composition thereof. I'm also wondering if a plume of ash making its way into the ATL along with whatever AEWs are propogating Wward would not have an effect similar to that of SAL dust.... pure speculation, of course.

Dont know, but i would think it would have to be an ungodly amount of ash to really have that kind of effect in the atlantic, like you said pure speculation.

P'cola- I wandered around a Freeper (?) site, looks like they pegged it, it's Nabro or Dubbi. Dubbi in 1861? not real sure.
Wonder how long, how hard, it's gonna erupt, or if others are going to join in.

thanks for the info on Khartoum.

Seems too unpredictable to forecast this volcanic ejection in Eritrea as it relates to the tropical weather. It could just as easily be negative as positive, and close to neutral is possible as well. For some guidance, here's the hurricane season of 1861, when a nearby volcano blew.
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Link

Thanks Cosmic for the link!

Speaking of sat images: Pinatubo

The Philippines had the misfortune of both having a big eruption and a typhoon hitting them on the same day. Nothing else formed for about a month during June (which is still sort of an early month in the WPac season anyway), but the rest of the season was fine.

The WunderMap shows it in much greater detail, allowing pinpointing the source. Definitely appears to be Nabro...

Sunrise in Assab is 5:42 AM local, or roughly 90 minutes from now (10:42 PM EDT).

now we need locust and wormwood

Do you guys think that if a major hurricane were to hit the U.S this year that the Weather Channel will still go into its traditional Storm Alert mode?

Pray tell nothing is coming unzipped,....on a larger scale with the others in the vicinity.


Volcanoes of Eritrea

Jalua

Alid

Dubbi

Nabro

Assab

Gufa

Mousa All

Quoting KEEPEROFTHEGATE:
now we need locust and wormwood

Nice catch Keeper, when they say the astroid is going to hit?

Dubbi





Nabro from orbit

Uploaded by rvermill47 on Jun 12, 2011

After getting multiple earthquake reports centered in Ethiopia I suspected a potential volcanic eruption. This has not been verified, but looks to be Nabro, a volcano that has no recent eruption data.
*Satellite data is copyright of www.sat24.com*

Quoting Patrap:
Dubbi





Nabro from orbit

That was a mean looking peace of rock

I say we could be looking at a VEI 5-6 eruption, similar to the Mount Pinatubo eruption of 1991 that cooled global temperatures by 0.2C for about a year. The main prehistorical eruption that created both calderas was probably a high-end VEI 6 eruption.

Quoting troy1993:
Do you guys think that if a major hurricane were to hit the U.S this year that the Weather Channel will still go into its traditional Storm Alert mode?

They should, they've been doing it for a long time now. The best music was the 2008 one.

http://youtu.be/6B73AQbcjE8

Quoting aquak9:
P'cola- I wandered around a Freeper (?) site, looks like they pegged it, it's Nabro or Dubbi. Dubbi in 1861? not real sure.
Wonder how long, how hard, it's gonna erupt, or if others are going to join in.

thanks for the info on Khartoum.

On Google Earth with the Satellite overlay on, the plume appears to be coming from a area called the Mat Ala crater. This is about 15.95 SSE of the Dubbi Volcano. The icon on G.E is named Nabro but when you click on it it states it mislabeled. There are at least 40 volcanoes in the immediate area lined up on the African Rift Valley. For what it is worth.
Link