Artificial Volcano: a Cool Idea?

A jet-powered airliner could suck up the volcano's ash particles and effectively stalling the jet engines...result is crash and burn baby!

Why do this experiment at or near an airfield? I hope it isn't an active airport!

Nice post. I think the feasibility of the experiment comes from the people paying for it. A grant from the government gives them points as doing something about the climate. Who cares if the results can be of any use. It is feel good BS.

By the way in Canada we are looking forward to global warming. We have had enough of the cold and were looking forward to Southerners visiting Canada to escape the heat. A kinda reverse snow bird tourism industry.So I will send a letter to our Government to ask them in UK to quit trying to undo global warming. Brrr, I think I need a sweater.

Thing is, if the ol' GW continues, the climate of the UK will be colder than Canada's now. Gotta keep that North Atlantic Drift burbling north....

Got any spare SnoCats?

100kg of water per hour...
Mind it still seems a bit iffy to me.
That's going to need a pump running at about 100 bar if my sums are right. And a garden hose will take that pressure? yeah right.
Del

This experiment was stopped was it not?

It appears to have been delayed.

I'm going to watch this on the TV tomorrow evening, so I cannot really say much about this until I'v seen the experiment, but personally I think it is a waste of time and money!

I doubt a balloon can lift the weight of 1km of pipe plus water. Have they really done their arithmetic? As it's a university I can imagine them doing loads of fancy maths and missing the basics.
Del

Speaking of missing the basics, I missed both that their hoping to pump water at 100 kg/hr up to 1 km of height and that the article has a second page where they admit that 4000~6000 bar of pressure will be needed for the final designed goal of a 20 km height particle deployment pipe. On page 2 they also say; more even distribution of particles, he says, thereby reducing the odds that they will clump together and fall back toward Earth. This is absurd. How tightly clumped the particles are has nothing to do with being positively or negatively buoyant at the pressure levels of 20 km of altitude. A quick look at the Wolfram Alpha reference page shows the phase diagram for the sulphur dioxide they imply will be the particulates. But at STP sulphur dioxide is a gas that is twice as heavy as air. As the pressure drops with altitude sulphur dioxide will remain a gas at all temperatures. Also the refractive index of sulphur dioxide seems to be very slightly less than water. So instead of possibly making crystal based clouds at this altitude and pressure of 20 km, or making droplet based clouds at lower elevations that water will create; sulphur dioxide will be a suspended gas that will slowly fall back to Earth.

For the sake of this experiment I hope that this is just some horrible reporting of a well reasoned but poorly explained experiment. If it isn't then I think somebody is laughing all the way to the bank.

What the weather men and universities often neglect is the Electrical Connection. Volcanoes. their plume (and earthquakes) are often associated with electrical activity. The ionosphere acts as a giant capacitor (condenser) charged up by the solar wind. Initially a plasma discharge to the Earth can be in the dark mode, becoming visible as a glow or forked lightning.

It may also be worth considering that plasma tends toward filamentary paths, often in twisted pairs (Birkeland Currents). These give rise to a vortex. Funny that most weather systems, tornadoes or whirlwinds follow a spiral pattern?

"A 2009 study by the U.K. meteorological office estimated that 10 million metric tons of sulfide particles injected annually into the stratosphere would cool the planet by approximately 2 °C within a few years. "

I thought this method was already determined to be damaging to the Ozone layer. Didn't we just finally get the ozone holes fixed/repaired/reduced (whatever the appropriate term is) and now they want to cause more?

If they are going to use water, where are they going to get it without further depleting our sources of drinking water?

What a waste of time, money and engineering knowledge!

This has to be the most idiotic experiment ever, first it is a waste of money, and second, all they had to do was talk to a couple of Vulcanologists, they would soon get the answers they were looking for, typical of British scientists today!

Didn't we touch on this concept with RichD last week?

I think we need a lot more data points and a lot more simulation work before we release our "mad scientists" on our own atmosphere!

There are plenty of erupting volcanoes to study. I think they should stick to that for now.

Some believe that there is a good deal of this sort of thing already going on that is not being done in a public, open way. So we may already have a problem.

We've got to be very clear on all the things our atmosphere really does. We know a lot about the weather. But there are also layers of charged particles up there, and super-heated layers. Do we really understand what they do well enough to risk fiddling around with them?

Maybe this particular experiment is so limited and controlled that it couldn't have any significant impact. But I would much prefer to see the sciences working to perfect their powers of observation and data gathering. "Geoengineering" needs really good science behind it. We've already made some big errors with genetic engineering. We don't need to repeat that scenario with our atmosphere.