Study over volcanic ash contamination conditions of Romanian air space-Etna

Abstract

This study is focused on finding the hypothetical conditions under of which the Romanian air space could be affected by a volcanic ash-like pollutant originating from Etna Volcano. We describe the plume transport behaviour, on its way to Romania, using the mass loading distribution displayed by the HYSPLIT (Hybrid Single Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory) model output. From the WLK (Wetterlagen-klassifikation) catalogue we have specific day sequences showing more than three days of a south-western circulation with a wet anticyclonic pattern over Romania. The resulting 24 cases in a period spanning more than a decade (2004-2014) displayed that the chances of contamination would be better for a quiescent environment around Etna’s summit. There were found ten cases in quiescent atmosphere and only four cases in windy atmosphere with Romanian air space contamination. Although it was not possible to determine the effective concentration of the fine ash pollutant it was possible to isolate the mass loading distribution in time. As the study cases displayed one order of magnitude difference between mass loading distributions it became obvious that the behaviour of the mass loading distribution in time has a directly dependence on the environmental stratification of the Etna’s summit atmosphere.

Keywords

• volcanic ash
• trajectories
• mass loading distribution
• air space contamination