IUGG 2015. Session VS31: Quantifying and Communicating Uncertainty During Volcanic Crises
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26th IUGG General Assembly
Dear colleagues ,
We would like to draw your attention and invite you to send your contributions to Session VS31: Quantifying and Communicating Uncertainty During Volcanic Crises at the next IUGG 2015 Meeting(http://www.iugg2015prague.com) to be held in Prague (June 22 – July 25, 2015).
VS31 Quantifying and Communicating Uncertainty During Volcanic Crises
Convener: Rosa Sobradelo (Barcelona, Spain)
Co-convener: Joan Martí (Barcelona, Spain)
Description
The management of volcanic crises is a complex task that involves foreseeing its evolution and evaluate possible management sub-plans. Decision makers are afraid of getting a decision wrong, where they need to take important life and death decisions under strict time and uncertainty constrains. A bad decision could have serious consequences, causing unnecessary economic disruption and public anxiety and distress. They need to make their decision based on how severe and how likely the possible hazard scenarios are, what casualties might result from these scenarios, how effective an evacuation would be, and what are the uncertainties of the volcanic risk assessment. In such situation, scientific results and evaluation may result inadequate if they are not presented in a sufficiently clear and understandable way. For this reason, during a volcanic crisis it is of particular importance the communication link between scientists or technicians with Civil Protection agents and decision makers. In this case, it is necessary to translate the scientific understanding of the geophysical hazard into a series of clearly explained scenarios that are accessible to the decision-making authorities. Studying and managing volcanic hazard is by its nature an inexact science, such that an appropriate scientific communication should convey information not only on the geophysical activity itself, but also on the uncertainties that always accompany any estimate or prediction. Therefore, effective volcanic risk management requires identification of feasible actions to improve communication strategies at different levels including: scientists-to-scientists, scientists-to-technicians, scientists-to-Civil Protection, scientists-to-decision makers, and scientists-to-general public. In this symposium, we welcome contributions on (1) existing decision models and approaches to quantifying uncertainty during volcanic crisis management; (2) existing methods that allow to identify the hazard and risk factors the decision maker needs to consider as a whole during a crisis. This is, all the possible scenarios, the hazard associated to each scenario taking into account past data and monitoring data, the vulnerability of each area via the evaluation of the population at risk, the evacuation time associated to each potential scenario, the economic losses associated to the infrastructure, properties, resources, etc; (3) key advances for best-practice communication protocols in crises situations, exploring the needs and constraints of different stakeholders for best-practice information flow and communication.
Volcano Listserv is a collaborative venture among Arizona State University (ASU), Portland State University (PSU), the Global Volcanism Program (GVP) of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, and the International Association for Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth's Interior (IAVCEI).
ASU - http://www.asu.edu/ PSU - http://pdx.edu/ GVP - http://www.volcano.si.edu/ IAVCEI - http://www.iavcei.org/
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