HR: 11:20h
AN: V32A-05    [Abstracts]
TI: Decision Analysis Tools for Volcano Observatories
AU: Hincks, T H
EM: T.Hincks@Bristol.ac.uk
AF: Dept. of Earth Sciences University of Bristol, Queens Road, Bristol, BS8 1RJ United Kingdom
AU: Aspinall, W
EM: Willy.Aspinall@Bristol.ac.uk
AF: Dept. of Earth Sciences University of Bristol, Queens Road, Bristol, BS8 1RJ United Kingdom
AU: Aspinall, W
EM: Willy.Aspinall@Bristol.ac.uk
AF: Aspinall & Associates, Woodside Close, Beaconsfield, HP9 1JQ United Kingdom
AU: * Woo, G
EM: Gordon.Woo@rms.com
AF: RMS Ltd, Peninsular House 30 Monument Street, London, EC3R 8HB United Kingdom
AB: Staff at volcano observatories are predominantly engaged in scientific activities related to volcano monitoring and instrumentation, data acquisition and analysis. Accordingly, the academic education and professional training of observatory staff tend to focus on these scientific functions. From time to time, however, staff may be called upon to provide decision support to government officials responsible for civil protection. Recognizing that Earth scientists may have limited technical familiarity with formal decision analysis methods, specialist software tools that assist decision support in a crisis should be welcome. A review is given of two software tools that have been under development recently. The first is for probabilistic risk assessment of human and economic loss from volcanic eruptions, and is of practical use in short and medium-term risk-informed planning of exclusion zones, post-disaster response, etc. A multiple branch event-tree architecture for the software, together with a formalism for ascribing probabilities to branches, have been developed within the context of the European Community EXPLORIS project. The second software tool utilizes the principles of the Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) for evidence-based assessment of volcanic state and probabilistic threat evaluation. This is of practical application in short-term volcano hazard forecasting and real-time crisis management, including the difficult challenge of deciding when an eruption is over. An open-source BBN library is the software foundation for this tool, which is capable of combining synoptically different strands of observational data from diverse monitoring sources. A conceptual vision is presented of the practical deployment of these decision analysis tools in a future volcano observatory environment. Summary retrospective analyses are given of previous volcanic crises to illustrate the hazard and risk insights gained from use of these tools.
DE: 3275 Uncertainty quantification (1873)
DE: 6309 Decision making under uncertainty
DE: 8419 Volcano monitoring (7280)
DE: 8488 Volcanic hazards and risks
SC: Volcanology, Geochemistry, Petrology [V]
MN: Fall Meeting 2005