Forecasting volcanic ash deposition using HYSPLIT

Abstract

A major source of error in forecasting where airborne volcanic ash will travel and land is the wind pattern above and around the volcano. GNS Science, in conjunction with MetService, is seeking to move its routine ash forecasts from using the ASHFALL program, which cannot allow for horizontal variations in the wind pattern, to HYSPLIT, which uses a full 4-D atmospheric model. This has required some extensions to the standard version of the HYSPLIT program, both to get appropriate source terms and to handle the fall velocities of ash particles larger than 100 microns. Application of the modified HYSPLIT to ash from the Te Maari eruption of 6 August 2012 from Tongariro volcano gives results similar to the observed ash distribution. However, it was also apparent that the high precision of these results could be misleading in actual forecasting situations, and there needs to be ways in which the likely errors in atmospheric model winds can be incorporated into ash models, to show all the areas in which there is a significant likelihood of deposited ash with each particular volcanic eruption model.