Volcanic Ash Flight Disruptions at London City Airport

In April 2010 the volcanic eruptions of Eyjafjallajokull in southern Iceland resulted in wide scale disruption of European air traffic. Although relatively small for a volcanic eruption, the resulting ash cloud was carried south, lingering over regions of central Europe, and causing flight disruption through concerns of engine damage. Lasting for just over 5 days for London airports, the grounding of flights was widely observed through the quieter skies and the absence of vapour trails, bringing discussion into the public domain on the usually unnoticed effects of air traffic.

A conveniently sited DREAMSys noisemapping trial taking place to the west of London City Airport captured this variation in environmental noise, the resulting statistical data and noisemaps can be seen below.

The Eyjafjallajokull eruption

A DREAMSys monitoring node

DREAMSys noisemaps

Here, the data has been averaged and spatially interpolated to provide a series of time-specific noisemaps.

To browse through the time history for this site, drag the scroll bar at the bottom of the map.

 

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