A novel framework for a unified international system of volcano early warning and hazard tracking

While numerous global initiatives exist to address the potential hazards posed by volcanic eruption events and assess impacts from a civil security viewpoint, there is still no single, unified, international system of early warning and hazard tracking for eruptions. Numerous gaps exist in the risk reduction cycle, from data collection, to data processing, and finally dissemination of salient information to relevant parties. As part of the International Space University's Space Studies Program during summer 2008, a detailed gap analysis of the state of volcano disaster risk reduction was undertaken. Using this analysis as a basis, a novel framework to deal with all the identified gaps is proposed as an outcome of this study. This paper presents the principal innovations concerning the data and information processing within this work. The name of the framework was chosen to be VIDA to abbreviate ‘Volcanic Activity Processing of Observation and Remote Sensing Data Integrated Data-Sharing and Analysis’. In order to present this framework, it is shown how different high performance computing resources can be orchestrated in order to support fast and efficient tools that would support VIDA in mitigating the risk posed by volcanic eruptions and other natural hazards. Furthermore, how the system could be used by describing different use cases is also presented in this paper.