Assimilation of Deformation Data for Eruption Forecasting: Potentiality Assessment Based on Synthetic Cases

In monitoring active volcanoes, the magma overpressure is one of the key parameters used in forecasting volcanic eruptions. This parameter can be inferred from the ground displacements measured on the Earth’s surface by applying inversion techniques. However, in most studies, the huge amount of information about the behavior of the volcano contained in the temporal evolution of the deformation signal is not fully exploited by inversion. Our work focuses on developing a strategy in order to better forecast the magma overpressure using data assimilation. We take advantage of the increasing amount of geodetic data [i.e., Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) and Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)] recorded on volcanoes nowadays together with the wide-range availability of dynamical models that can provide better understanding about the volcano plumbing system. Here, we particularly built our strategy on the basis of the Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF). We forecast the temporal behaviors of the magma overpressures and surface deformations by adopting a simple and generic two-magma chamber model and by using synthetic GNSS and/or InSAR data. We prove the ability of EnKF to both estimate the magma pressure evolution and constrain the characteristics of the deep volcanic system (i.e., reservoir size as well as basal magma inflow). High temporal frequency of observation is required to ensure the success of EnKF and the quality of assimilation is also improved by increasing the spatial density of observations in the near-field. We thus show that better results are obtained by combining a few GNSS temporal series of high temporal resolution with InSAR images characterized by a good spatial coverage. We also show that EnKF provides similar results to sophisticated Bayesian-based inversion while using the same dynamical model with the advantage of EnKF to potentially account for the temporal evolution of the uncertain model parameters. Our results show that EnKF works well with the synthetic cases and there is a great potential in using the method for real-time monitoring of volcanic unrest.