Lorenzo Mantiloni "Forecasting Eruptive Vent Locations with a 3D dyke propagation and stress model"

Forecasting the locations of future eruptions in volcanic regions is critically important, since many of these regions are densely populated. Forecast models need data, that is, the locations of past eruptions, to be validated, and this can be difficult when we know few of such locations. Here we develop a forecast strategy combining physics-based models for the simulation of magma pathways in the Earth's crust and statistical methods to retrieve the statistical distributions of few key parameters. These parameters account for the way the local topography and tectonic stresses determine the magma pathways. This enables us to forecast future eruption locations through additional simulations whose parameters are drawn from the retrieved distributions. We show how the strategy can be validated through gelatin-based analog models, where, though we cannot retrieve all the parameters accurately, we perform reliable forecasts even when data are scarce. Then, we show how it can be applied to volcanic regions with realistic topographies.