VONA Design Review Teleconference 2023 Mar 1

Details

2023-Mar-1, 00-01 UTC, Webex

Agenda

1. Welcome
2. Review agenda
3. Issues regarding the re-factoring of TAC VONA
   • A TAC element has multiple meanings. Shall we have separate representation for each of them?
     • Item 5: Location of volcano or volcanic ash source - This represents the location of volcano or specific vent or field of volcanic ash
     • Item 7: Source elevation - This represents the elevation of the vent or the average height of volcanic ash field for re-suspended volcanic ash.
   • A TAC element has multiple types of content. Shall we have separate representation for each of them? Can we be more specific without "inferring" that the volcanic activity has ceased but we still want to provide information on its aftermath?
     • Item 12: Activity status - The contents it carries involve activity statuses "ERUPTION OCCURRED", "ERUPTION ONGOING", "HEIGHTENED UNREST", "DECREASING ACTIVITY", an indication of last VA emission time (suppose the eruption has ceased?), and an indication of the presence of re-suspended VA (suppose the eruption has ceased for some time?)
     • Item 14: Duration - The contents it carries include time duration as well as textual descriptions. It appears that the two may not be mutually exclusive
     • Item 17: Movement - Is VERTICAL mutually exclusive with other choices?
   • Possible need to represent multiple entities
     • Item 5 and Items 15, 16 and 17: The TAC template only allows the representation of a single vent and volcanic ash cloud. Will there a potential need for multiple vents and clouds? Does a cloud need to be associated with a vent?
4. It was noticed that real life VONA reports has additional information which is not currently supported by the TAC template [Mark please elaborate as necessary]. What is the view of WG-MOG on the potential changes to the TAC template in the coming years?
5. In an IWXXM schema, each element (and also items in a list) has a note attached to it. Where can we find official descriptions of terms like "ONGOING EPISODIC"?
6. During re-factoring we have identified some features which could be reused in other reports (volcano, volcanic activity, volcanic ash). Based on the TAC template we could only identify a few properties of these features (e.g. for a volcano its name, IAVCEP number, location, location of its vents). Is there any means we could have a more comprehensive description of properties of these features to improve the feasibility to be resued?

Discussions and actions

• Properties of a volcano (Items 4 and 5) - Noting that the name may be absent (e.g. new underwater volcano), the location is not absolute (the location mentioned in VONA could be different from the well known one due to eruption). Elevation of the vent in Item 7 could be grouped as a property of a volcano (again it is not absolute), but it does not mean that Item 7 could be grouped under properties of a volcano as the source could be from re-suspended volcanic ash.
• Other items (partially or wholly) which could be grouped as properties of a volcano include activity status (Item 12), onset time (Item 13) and duration (Item 14).
• ONGOING EPISODIC and ONGOING CONS in Item 14 are descriptions indicating how the eruption is going and is not mutually exclusive with the time period of the eruption. It will be useful to tryout if mentioned separately could better describe the situation.
• VERTICAL in Item 17 refers to situation with little horizontal movement (quasi-stationary? May be due to pre-eruption emission).
• If a volcano has multiple vents they are likely to be relatively close together and may not be necessary to describe them separately.
• There exists relationships between a source (either a volcano or deposits acting as a source of re-suspended volcanic ash) and the ash cloud they are producing.
• The current VONA TAC template only supports the description of one ash cloud, not to say other kind of ash cloud like SO2. If the situation necessitates the description of multiple clouds they will be added in the Remarks section. Having the flexibility to describe more clouds is beneficial.
• Descriptions of terms like ONGOING EPISODIC are under development and for the schemas we may just want to leave the note section empty for the moment.
• CHOY to try modelling in terms of objects including volcano, re-suspension ash source and ash cloud and their aggregation to form the IWXXM VONA report. These objects could be re-used in other messages like QVA.

Attendees

• BL Choy
• Paula Acethorp
• Mark Oberfield (apologies)