For many people in this world, volcanic eruptions are a hazard. Their dangers range from those up close, with lava flows and explosions, to people around the world, with climate change caused by volcanic gas dispersal in the stratosphere. In between there, ash clouds and deposits, earthquakes, landslides, & lahars all present a danger.
But infrequent or remote eruptions make gathering data on volcanic processes very difficult, and even where data is plentiful, recognizing diagnostic patterns can be very hard. So volcanologists and scientists with the United States Geological Survey (USGS) have turned to supercomputers, or high-performance computing (HPC) systems.
The USGS has three supercomputers available to scientists, Denali, Tallgrass, and Hovenweep. With these computers, large data sets can be processed and complex systems of equations can be solved quite quickly. They can create models landslide and lahar scenarios, assess ash fall hazards, and provide real-time forecasting of lava flows.
“Machine learning methods help us monitor changes in volcanic systems and anticipate eruptions by probing the increasingly mind-numbing quantity of data that modern instrumentation produces. For example, the Kīlauea imaging project is analyzing more than 200 million seismic waveforms to produce three-dimensional images of the magma system. This is physically impossible for any group of scientists to do by hand.” – Dr. Roger Denlinger, Research Geophysicist at the Cascades Volcano Observatory
Plus, a new geophysical model developed by USGS scientists called Lava2d can simulate how lava will flow over the landscape during eruptions, and an ash dispersal model called Ash3d computes how ash will be carried by the wind, and when it will fall out of suspension.
“The application of HPC to volcano science is truly exciting to see flourish; from simulating ash cloud dispersal to modelling the complex motion of lava flows and lahars, results improve our scientific understanding of hazards and the quality of USGS decision support information for stakeholders.” – Dr. Tina Neal, Volcano Science Center Director