Probabilistic Methodology for Long-Term Assessment of Volcanic Hazards

Because of the difficulty of describing the complex spatial and temporal patterns inherent to volcanism, the use of solely deterministic models is not sufficient for long-term estimation of volcanic hazards. In order to account for the intrinsic uncertainty of volcanism that occurs in space and time and with respect to event types and their intensity, the use of probabilistic models becomes quite natural for long-term hazard assessment. Here, we discuss a range of probabilistic approaches to forecast the future spatial distribution of volcanism, including kernel, adaptive kernel, and Cox process methods. An application to the volcanic arc of Tohoku illustrates the proposed methodology.