MONITORING:ICELANDIC VOLCANIC ash has been detected in Connemara and may reach extensive parts of the country by tomorrow, according to a leading NUI Galway physicist.
Dust radars at NUIG’s Mace Head atmospheric research station, some 50 miles west of Galway city, detected ash early yesterday morning from Iceland’s Grímsvötn volcano.
The ash was detected at ground level and most of the ash mass was in large "super micron size" particles, Prof Colin O'Dowd, director of NUIG's Centre for Climate and Air Pollution Studies, told The Irish Times. "The very edge of the plume was over the middle of Ireland some hours later, and may cover the island extensively by tomorrow," he said.
“However, it is not at the same dense levels as last year and the current stormy weather is tending to break up the stratified layers of ash which we saw last year.”
The Mace Head instrumentation is some of the most advanced and most sensitive on the island. It gave the initial confirmation of ash from Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland over Ireland in April 2010.
Prof O’Dowd noted that while the ash grain may fall out of the atmosphere sooner and is of a larger and therefore non-hazardous size, much depends on the injection height from Grímsvötn. The eruption was reported to be much stronger than last year’s.
“The latest information from Iceland suggests that the injection height from the plume has reduced considerably and it is not as intense as it was,” he said.
Mace Head intends to issue daily forecasts and is liaising with the London Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre and the Environmental Protection Agency.
The agency said yesterday the eruption had had “no significant impact on ambient ground level air quality in Ireland to date”.
The agency has monitors for particulate matter and sulphur dioxide across the country. It said it was increasing its monitoring in light of the eruption. This can be viewed on its air-quality data page at epa.ie
