Fellow meteorologist and South American weather expert Jim Andrews showed me these unbelievable photos (my favorite is the second one) of the Chaiten volcano eruption down in southern Chili. I saw some great shots yesterday, but these just blew me away. You can see the large ash cloud and the glow of the volcano, then you have all this lightning. This is not unusual during an eruption and we saw some of this with Mt. St. Helen in Washington back in 1980.

The volcano began erupting on Friday with a 12-mile high plume. Many areas downwind, including parts of Argentina were covered with ash.

Large volcanic eruptions can easily influence the world's climate (cooling) for a period of time, causing a decrease in solar energy reaching the earth, as the tiny particles of ash remain in the high atmosphere and reflect the sunlight. I talked with Jim, who is also well versed in geology and geography, and he also feels that this particular eruption will probably be too small in size to have a large scale impact on the climate. The far southern location might also argue against it as well. Keep in mind, this eruption is still very new and neither of us are experts when it comes to volcanic eruptions, so our quick opinions could easily be out to lunch.

Jim Andrews also takes a close look at the volcano in his blog.

By the way, I had another post all lined up for today, but this particular server was down all afternoon and I couldn't do a thing with this blog. The volcano story was a quick one to post. I will get to the comments later this afternoon.