Volcanic seismicity is fundamental for monitoring and investigating volcanic systems' structure and underlying processes. Volcanoes are very complex objects, where both the pronounced heterogeneity and topography can strongly modify the recorded signals for a wide variety of source types. In source inversion work, one of the challenges is to capture the effect of small-scale heterogeneities in order to remove complex path effects from seismic data. This requires high-resolution imagery, which is a significant challenge in heterogeneous volcanoes. In addition, the link between the variety of physical processes beneath volcanoes and their seismic response (or lack of) is often not well known, leading to large uncertainties in the interpretation of volcano dynamics based on seismic observations. Considering all of these complexities, many standard techniques for seismic analysis may fail to produce breakthrough results.
To address the outlined challenges, this session aims to bring together seismologists, volcano and geothermal seismologists, wave propagation and source modellers, working on different aspects of volcano seismology including (i) seismicity catalogues, statistics and spatio-temporal evolution of seismicity, (ii) seismic wave propagation and scattering, (iii) new developments in volcano imagery, (iii) seismic source inversions, and (iv) seismic time-lapse monitoring. Contributions on controlled geothermal systems in volcanic environments are also welcome. Contributions on developments in instrumentation and new methodologies (e.g. Machine Learning) are particularly welcome.
By considering interrelationships in these complementary seismological areas, we aim to build up a coherent picture of the latest advances and outstanding challenges in volcano seismology.