2014 COV – 3-day workshop – Reviewing Hazard Mapping Techniques. Organised by Calder, Delgado and Lindsay.
This is a pre-conference workshop 6-8 September 2014.
(email eliza.calder@ed.ac.uk to register).
Workshop Description: The principal objective of this workshop is to bring together people working on volcanic hazard maps in order to review the techniques currently employed to generate these maps and to work towards establishing an IAVCEI best practices report. The workshop will provide an overview of a diverse variety of techniques currently used, a forum for open discussion about approaches that are successful and/or those that are problematic and as such will provide guidance and a valuable training experience for those involved in the production of maps. Generating hazard maps (including those that are probabilistic) for active or potentially active volcanoes is recognized as a fundamental step towards the mitigation of risk to vulnerable communities. The responsibility for generating such maps most commonly lies with government institutions but in many cases input from the academic community is either solicited or relied on. It is of critical importance to understand the wide variety of methods that are currently employed to generate such maps, and the respective philosophies on which they are based, as well as to acknowledge the notion that one model cannot fit all situations. A key aspect of this workshop is that participants will be encouraged to bring their experience to the table for discussion, so that the workshop format will be more about exchange of experience rather than instruction about a given technique. Some hazard maps are based solely on the distribution of prior events, others take into account estimated recurrence intervals of past events. Increasingly, computational models of volcanic plumes and flows are used to gauge potential areas of inundation or tephra loading, and these also range from simple but robust empirical relationships to stochastic application of complex fluid dynamical models. These methods are all valid, but have their different uses and will be discussed in context. The workshop participants will benefit from cross-fertilization of ideas, both across disciplinarily boundaries (such as from tephra hazards to debris flow hazards) as well as from a range of geographically and sociologically diverse applications. One aspect on which we will focus is on standardization of the terminology used; this is needed to improve communication both within the volcanology community as well as with stakeholders, and the end users of these maps. A workshop dedicated to hazard mapping is both timely and community-driven. There is both a research push from volcanologists pushing at the frontiers between volcanic hazard and risk and a societal pull coming from the increased need for systematised, universal approaches to analysing and communicating volcanic hazards.