Preliminary Study to Improve False Positives of the Network - VOLCANO Ash Cloud Lightning of WWLLN in Argentina-Chile Volcanoes

DAIANA, M. BAISSAC; M. G. NICORA; ELDO, E. ÁVILA

Napoles

Congreso; Cities On Volcanoes 10; 2018

In the last years, the volcanism in the south american Andes region has shown great activity. Since 2006, with th eruption of Chaitén volcano following in 2011 with the complex Puyehue - Cordón Caulle and the most recent one in 2015 of the Calbuco volcano, they had destructive effects on the environment, the economy and the health of the sectors involved. The fall of pyroclastic material constituted one of the most far-reaching direct hazards related to eruptions. These cited eruptions showed great electrical activity during several phases of the eruptive process.Varied authors (Behnke et al., 2012, Behnke and McNutt, 2014, McNutt and Williams, 2010, among others) showed that the detection of the electrical activity produced in the volcanic plume during an eruption turns out to be a complementary utility tool to detect explosive eruptions, to determine the existence of a volcanic plume associated with the eruption and estimate its route.The VOLCANO Ash Cloud Lightning project detects explosive volcanic eruptions from electrical discharges registered with the WWLLN (Wide World Lightning Location Network). It has monitored 1825 volcanoes around the world. The alert is sent by e-mail to the registered receivers when the system detects lightning within an internal central area of 20 km radius and an external one of 100 km with center in the crater of the monitored volcano.In our work, we propose to improve the alerts emitted by this network, considering climatological characteristics of the region. That is, determine the frecuency with which thunderstorms are generated and how are wind patterns in general. Adding this information to the network could reduce false positives, so that the eruption alert system based on the detection of electric discharges will be more efficient and will bw coupled with other tools used.