Mt. Fitzherbert

Potential ash hazards: Wind forecasts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), coupled with eruption models, show that ash clouds that rise above the crater rim would drift to the northeast.

Recent observations: The pattern of seismicity at the volcano remains essentially unchanged from the previous few weeks. A strong (M 6.7) earthquake occurred at 08:32 UTC (00:32 PST) in the Gulf of California and registered clearly on seismographs across the region including several from the Mt. St. Helens network. Such distant events may take a few to many minutes to reach the seismometers at Mount St. Helens and show up as large, very low frequency undulations in the seismic trace. A technical problem with our satellite telemetry system interrupted the transmission of data from several seismic stations for approximately ten hours last night. Other stations that transmit directly to the observatory continued to provide us with seismic data throughout the outage. As has been the case over the last few months small earthquakes continue to be recorded every 2-3 minutes. This pattern of seismicity coupled with other monitoring parameters suggests the slow extrusion of dacite onto the crater floor at Mount St. Helens continues unabated. Typical winter weather conditions continue to preclude visual observations or field work.