Probabilistic volcanic mass flow hazard assessment using statistical
surrogates of deterministic simulations
Abstract
Probabilistic volcanic hazard assessments require (1) an identification
of the hazardous volcanic source; (2) estimation of the
magnitude-frequency relationship for the volcanic process; (3)
quantification of the dependence of hazard intensity on magnitude and
external conditions; and (4) estimation of hazard exceedance from the
magnitude-frequency and hazard intensity relationship. For volcanic mass
flows, quantification of the hazard intensity is typically undertaken
through the use of computationally expensive mass flow simulators.
However, this computational expense restricts the number of samples that
can be used to produce a probabilistic assessment and limits the ability
to rapidly update hazard assessments in response to (e.g.) changing
source probabilities. We develop an alternate approach to defining
hazard intensity through a surrogate model that provides a continuous
estimate of simulation outputs at negligible computational expense,
demonstrated through a probabilistic hazard assessment of dome collapse
(block-and-ash) flows at Taranaki volcano, New Zealand. A Gaussian
Process emulator trained on a database of simulations is used as the
surrogate model of hazard intensity across the input space of possible
dome collapse volumes and configurations, which is then sampled using a
volume-frequency relationship of dome collapse flows. The demonstrated
technique is a tractable solution to the problem of probabilistic
volcanic hazard assessment, with the surrogates providing a good
approximation of the simulator at very limited computational expense,
and is generally applicable to volcanic hazard and geo-hazard
assessments that are limited by the demands of numerical simulations.