A quantitative model for volcanic hazard assessment

Abstract

Volcanic hazard assessment is a basic ingredient for risk-based decision-making in land-use planning and emergency management. Volcanic hazard is defined as the probability of any particular area being affected by a destructive volcanic event within a given period of time (Fournier d’Albe 1979). The probabilistic nature of such an important issue derives from the fact that volcanic activity is a complex process, characterized by several and usually unknown degrees of freedom that are often linked by nonlinear relationships (e.g. Bak et al. 1988). Except in sporadic cases, the result of this complexity is an intrinsic, and perhaps unavoidable, unpredictability of the time evolution of the volcanic system from a deterministic point of view.