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Abstract:
Owing to the current lack of reliable pre-eruptive models, often volcanologists rely on the observation of monitoring anomalies to forecast volcanic eruptions. Taking advantage from the work made in the development of Bayesian Event Trees, in this paper we formalize an entropy-based model to translate the observation of anomalies into eruption probabilities. The model has some important features worth being remarked: i) it is rooted in a coherent logic, which gives a physical sense to the heuristic information of volcanologists in terms of entropy; ii) it is fully transparent and it can be established well in advance of a crisis, making the results reproducible and providing a transparent audit trail, which reduces the degree of subjective opinion in volcanological communication with civil authorities; iii) it is embedded in a unified probabilistic framework, which provides an univocal taxonomy of different kinds of uncertainty affecting the forecast and handles these uncertainties in a formal way. For the sake of example, we apply the procedure to the eruption forecasting during the 1982-1984 phase of unrest at Campi Flegrei, Italy.
