Slug Flow: Modeling in a Conduit and Associated Elastic Radiation

Abstract

Among the eruptive styles, the Strombolian activity is one of the more easy to study because of its repetitive behavior. For this reason large amount of data can be comfortably collected. Strombolian volcanoes are like natural laborato- ries repeating the same experiment (individual explosions) many times each day. The development of quantitative models of eruptive dynamics is driven by the comparison of experimental ob- servations and synthetic data obtained through mathemat- ical, numerical or analogue modeling. Since Strombolian activity offers a profuse amount of interesting seismic signals, during the last decades there has been growing attention on seismological techniques aimed at retrieving the conduit geometry and the eruption dynamics from the seismological recordings. One of these techniques, the source function inversion, is able to re- trieve a summary of the forces acting on the volcanic con- duit during the VLP event generation [5]. The comparison of observed source functions with synthetic ones, obtained through numerical modeling, allow us to put constraints on the proposed models. Quantitative models, able to fit seismological observa- tions, are a powerful tool for interpreting seismic record- ings and therefor the seismological monitoring of active volcanoes.