Predicting the dispersal of waste gases and particulates from chimney stacks has been a standard and improving part of industrial combustion design, at least since the UK 1956 Clean Air Act (US 1963).  More recent design codes have increasingly been based on computer models of air flows and dispersions in the vicinity of flue stacks, continually modified over a period of years in the light of actual measurements of wind velocities and flue gas and particle concentrations at different distances from the flue gas pipe exit and the ground.  Literally thousands of reported experiments have contributed to the increasing reliability of the design codes.

This industrial situation is the nearest well-researched analogue to the volcanic eruptions in Iceland on May 22 and in April last year, and to the problem of predicting the behaviour of the resultant plume of gases and particles over the land and seas of Europe.

Do the Meteorological Experts ever consult the Industrial literature?

Have the British Meteorological Office dust cloud modellers ever consulted any engineers whose professional job it has been over at least 50 years to mitigate the effects of effluent from industrial processes, mainly by rapid dispersion in the atmosphere?  One thinks not – otherwise the primacy of systematically checking model predictions against all actual observations would have been brought home to the Met Office modellers.  The aviation industry and the general public would then have been saved from thinking that the pretty three-coloured maps issued at 18 hour intervals represented reality, when they patently did not.

It took the feisty Michael O’Leary, boss of Ryanair, with a business to run, to show the Met Office, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and Mr Philip Hammond, the British Transport Minister with ultimate responsibility for the CAA, what should have been done all along – the taking of actual measurements.

Not that Mr O’Leary has got any thanks for his trouble.  Mr Hammond, on his Newsnight interview on Monday, 23 May, clearly treated the Met Office’s maps as more or less gospel truth.  Thus he responded on Tuesday evening, after a meeting of the government’s emergencies committee (Cobra) that Mr O’Leary’s actions (i.e. taking measurements) were “confusing and irresponsible”.  They were “confusing” apparently because they flatly contradicted the Met Office’s primary predictions of high level dust concentrations (so-called “red” levels) over Central and North East Scotland where flights had been cancelled.

Instead of sending his advisors to reconsider their model and arranging to get more data over wider areas, Mr Hammond denounced Mr O’Leary’s action as “irresponsible” when he was actually trying to save his and others’ businesses from massive losses by highlighting yet another major Met Office botch-up.

Notwithstanding the threat of a ministerial rebuke, British Airways’s CEO (another feisty Irishman – Willie Walsh) also sent one of its aircraft to cruise around for 45 minutes at various heights in the centre of the “ash clouds” red zone on Tuesday 24 May and found nothing.  Incredibly one may think, the Met Office actually has, standing on the ground, a BAe 146 plane with particulate sampling equipment, but this is being readied for an experiment over the Sahara desert.  It also has a new (Cessna 421) plane due for delivery in July.

There is a fundamental point here

Computer models of industrial scale processes – the nearest analogue in complexity to the complexity of weather processes, always start life as theories. In the systematic feedback of observations over many hundreds if not thousands of trials, the models are refined, modified, even abandoned, before the survivors of this discipline are accepted as reliable tools for the design of equipment on which people’s lives and livelihoods will depend.

This essential model-observation feedback discipline seems very lacking in the Met Office[1] and even more menacingly to our future, in its subsidiary, the Hadley Climate Change Forecasting Centre.  This Centre has taken on the job of predicting vastly more complex climate systems, not 5 days ahead, but 50 years ahead, evidently without sufficient systematic verification feedback mechanisms being in place and rigorously applied.

What is therefore truly “irresponsible” in the present and on-going situation is the Government’s reliance on predictions from the enclosed world of meteorology and the even newer specialism of climatology to instigate not just the cancellation of some hundreds of flights on two occasions within 13 months, but to push an entire country, Britain, rapidly towards an energy and industrial catastrophe by its emissions policy, based as it is on an unvalidated, indeed contested, computer model.

(For more details on energy and emissions facts, policies and predictions, visit the following pages on this website Nuclear Energy and Environment, Alternative Energy Sources, Electricity, the Government’s “green” energy plans evaluated, and Energy and Emissions for more data.)

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[1] The improvements in short-term weather forecasting by the Met Office are due to a large increase in satellite observations of fronts, not to predictive models.