Training course

Training course on "e-tools designed to long and short term hazard assessment and decision making during volcanic crisis"

This training course was given by Dr. Joan Marti, Rosa Sobradelo and Stefania Bartolini from the Institute of Earth Sciences "Jaume Almera" (CSIC).

CONTENT

This course was to train on a number of e-tools designed to long and short term hazard assessment and decision making during volcanic crisis. The tools included were:

VORIS (VOlcanic Risk Information System): it is a GIS-based tool for volcanic hazard assessment. Its main objective is to provide the user the tools required for generating volcanic risk scenarios and hazard maps for different volcanic hazards, based on numerical simulations of those hazards. Up to this version, VORIS is able to simulate ash fallout, lava flows and pyroclastic density currents. VORIS 2.0.1 also includes tools for the computation of volcanic susceptibility.

HASSET: Event tree structures constitute one of the most useful and necessary tools of modern volcanology to assess the volcanic hazard of future volcanic scenarios. In particular, to evaluate the probabilities of occurrence of possible volcanic scenarios and their potential impacts on urbanized areas. In this course, we will present HASSET, a Hazard Assessment Event Tree probability tool, built on an event tree structure to estimate the probability of occurrence of a future volcanic scenario, and to evaluate the most relevant sources of uncertainty from the corresponding volcanic system. HASSET is a free software package in the form of a plugin for the open source geographic information system Quantum Gis (QGIS), providing a graphically supported computation of the event tree structure in an interactive and user-friendly way. Currently, it has only been developed for Mac and Linux Ubuntu 10.10

Decision Model: Understanding the potential evolution of a volcanic crisis is crucial to improving the design of effective mitigation strategies. This is especially the case for volcanoes close to densely-populated regions, where inappropriate decisions may trigger widespread loss of life, economic disruption and public distress. We present an objective, real-time methodology for evaluating the evolution of an emergency and assess the risk at each stage in order to assist decision making with the implementation of mitigation actions.