This footage is from an airplane that flew around the Grímsvötn eruption today. Lightning have been unusually common around this eruption. It is normal that lightning occur within the ash cloud, but during this one there are much more than usual. The highest occurance of lightning during the Eyjafjallajökull eruption was 22. This time it has gone up to 2198 lightning bolts.
This image shows the lightning count of the Icelandic Meteorology office. They’ve set up an entire page with up to date lightning information in English.
Anonymous asked: how many tonnes of ash fell from eyjaffajokull or whatever in 2010 overall
I don’t know how much ash fell from Eyjafjallajökull overall and can’t find any numbers for it. However the flow of ash went up to around 750 tonnes per second. That is the estimated maximum, but it was generally between 10 and 400 tonnes per second. I can’t find an average over that period, but if we guess that the average was 100 tonnes per second for three months, then we get around 250 million tonnes. 250 million tonnes happens to be the amount of garbage the USA produces each year. In any case the number becomes quite difficult to imagine.
I remember an interview with Ólafur Eggertsson, farmer at Þorvaldseyri, closest to the volcano. He was saying that he’d cleared several hundred tonnes from his farmfields. However he was still nowhere near what poured out in one second.