Recent advances in volcanic ash forecasting at the Bureau of Meteorology

Meelis J Zidikheri¹, Chris Lucas¹, Richard Dare¹, Mey Manickam¹, Rodney Potts¹

1. Bureau of Meteorology, Melbourne, VICTORIA, Australia

Volcanic ash is an aviation hazard with considerable economic impact due to diversions and the grounding of aircraft during eruption events. Improved monitoring and forecasting tools are therefore in great demand to enable airline operators to better manage the risks of flying through airspace with possible ash contamination. There has been significant investment in volcanic ash research at the Bureau of Meteorology in the last decade with the aim of improving the monitoring and forecasting capability of the Bureau's Darwin Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre (VAAC), which is responsible for the region that includes Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, one of the most volcanically active regions globally. The research efforts include improvement in the modelling of physical processes such as dry and wet deposition of ash, representation of meteorological uncertainty through the use of ensemble numerical prediction models to drive dispersion models, use of state-of-the-art ash remote sensing algorithms with the capability of retrieving ash properties such as mass load, and development of inverse modelling techniques with the purpose of improving the characterisation of the dispersion model source term by making use of the aforementioned satellite data. In this presentation, we demonstrate how these science developments will improve the volcanic ash forecasting capability of the Darwin VAAC using several eruption case studies.