Dear Colleagues,

We would like to draw your attention to a full day VHub.org workshop at the 2013 IAVCEI General Assembly, to be held in Kagoshima, Japan, on July 25th.

Workshop: An introduction to the VHub.org Cyberinfrastructure and Hands-on sessions on many of the on-line tools already available to its members

Topics to be covered include on-line models dealing with volcanic processes and hazards, educational materials, the submission process, using the ‘groups’ feature, privacy rights, the VHub.org workspace, numerical models available for download, and more.

Introductions to numerous online simulation tools will be given, including:

Pingu: Pingu is a tool for plotting standard major element and trace elements diagrams. The input is a file separated by tabs or spaces in which each row is a particular sample. There are two ways to input the data: right button-click upload or from the Workspace (advanced users). A tab with different alternatives of plots and another to set the key of the plot are provided. The output can be directly downloaded from Vhub to your personal computer as a high quality jpeg image.

BET_VH: The main purpose of this software is to provide a graphically supported computation of long-term probabilities of volcanic hazardous phenomena (i.e., lava flows, tephra fall, pyroclastic flows, lahars, etc.) through a Bayesian Event Tree model for Volcanic Hazard (BET_VH). The model represents a flexible tool to provide probabilities of any specific event at which we are interested in, by merging all the available information, such as models, a priori beliefs, and past data. It is mainly based on a Bayesian procedure, in order to quantify the aleatory and epistemic uncertainty characterizing the impact of volcanic eruptions in terms of hazard assessment. The method deals only with long-term forecasting, therefore in principle it can be useful for land use planning.

Windre: This tool allows you to calculate the statistics of wind direction and speed at or near active volcanoes. I am using the 4-times daily NCEP-DOE Reanalysis 2 data. Currently there are 536 volcanoes in the database. All these volcanoes have exhibited historical activity based on the Smithsonian database (see also Siebert et al. 2010). The wind data used in this tool span 22 years (1990-2011).

Tephra2: Tephra2 is written in C and is used to forecast tephra accumulation following explosive volcanic eruptions. The code uses a closed-form solution of the advection-diffusion equation, particle fall velocities that depend on local Reynold’s number, and stratified wind field to forecast tephra accumulation, expressed as kilograms per cubic meter and particle size distribution of tephra at specific locations from the vent. This tool is available as a forward model, an educational resource, and as a resource for probabilistic hazard analysis.

Titan2D: The Titan2D toolkit is used for modeling of geophysical mass flows over natural terrain (volcanic flows, avalanches, landslides etc.). Titan2D uses an adaptive finite volume scheme, and assumes that a large class of granular flows of geophysical origin can be modeled as an incompressible continuum satisfying a Mohr-Coulomb law (see References for detailed mathematical formulation). The solution is parallelized using the message-passing interface (MPI), and simulations for difficult terrains can be relatively time consuming even on large computational clusters. An essential input is the digital elevation model (DEM), since the flow simulation requires elevation, slope, curvature, and material information at every cell to be computed. This tool fronts a Titan2D simulation, but does not prepare the necessary DEM input, which is a prerequisite. Each of these tools is installed and available for all to use on VHub.org. Come to the workshop for explanations, help, and hands-on exercises with these and other VHub.org tools. Sessions will be presented by tool developers and/or experienced users familiar with the assumptions, validation exercises, constitutive equations, and VHub.org interface of the tool they will present. Get your questions answered and find out where to go for more detailed information about any particular model. Get ideas for how to integrate these tools into your research, work and/or classroom. Find out how to become a tool developer and share the models that you have designed for your own research with the greater volcanological community.

Registration is free but is required no later than July 1st for participation. Registrants who are unable to participate are asked to contact the organizers no later than July 12th so that space can be allocated to other applicants. You will need to bring your own computer. Some computers may be available for renting at participant’s expense.

For more information contact Jorge V. Bajo Sanchez at jvbajo@buffalo.edu?scope=">jvbajo@buffalo.edu or Leah Courtland courtland@mail.usf.edu?scope=">courtland@mail.usf.edu

Best Regards,

Leah Courtland (University of South Florida) Jorge V. Bajo Sanchez (University of Buffalo) Greg Valentine (University of Buffalo) Shinji Takarada (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Japan)