Popocatepetl Activity Alert

[dgavin]

While it's stoll roaring and booming to a lesser degree, CENAPRED reports that thay have been monitoring small Lahar activity over the last few weeks, indicating that more heat is reaching the snow covered summit.

[dgavin]

Reports from last night coming in from varios news sources:

Access to Popopcatepetl has been rescricted to 12km distance, and the mountian was upgraded to a yellow-3 status yesterday. In our terminology this is a condition orange with pre condition red alert status. The mexico govenement has put near 11,000 soldiers into the area in preperation for evacuations of near by town and villages. A few sources indicate thta a explosive eruption did occure last night and sent tefra and lama bombs about 1.5km out form the summit, this has been hard to verify the accuracy of though.

Of concern to the mexican government, is that right now the wind is blowing right from the mountain, almost directly towards Mexico City thats only 60km distant. If the mountian does erupt before the winds change it could spell some serious problems for thier capital city.

[dgavin]

CENCPRED status report confirms 1.5km lava bomb and ejecta.

Here is a picture from last night. http://www.cenapred.unam.mx/popo/2013/may/p0515131.jpg

[Romanus]

Interwebz are fairly alive with recent news on this eruption...

Thanks for the update!

[dgavin]

Popocatepetl seems to be a bit more quiet today, steam plume of 2km with some minor ash, and low some lava ejecta at the summit, glow visible at night. No changes to it's alert status, still sitting at a pre-red condition.