'Baby Steps' For AI Volcano Forecasting System

Friday, 28 February 2025, 5:09 pm
Article: RNZ

Coco Lance, RNZ Pacific Digital Journalist
Christina Persico, RNZ Pacific bulletin editor

A volcanologist says a new artificial intelligence (AI) volcano forecasting tool, with the potential to save lives around the world, is still some way off being rolled out in places like Tonga.

It uses data from well-monitored volcanoes and applies it to under-monitored sites.

Auckland University volcanology professor Shane Cronin, who has worked at the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai disaster site, said there are around 80 major volcanoes in the southwestern Pacific, many of which are not well-monitored.

"At the moment...with Tonga developing new senses, developing new network, it's kind of still baby steps," he said.

"It's still developing the basics, measuring and recording the basics, and then I think a few years down the track, we'll be able to apply these more advanced methods."

He said in New Zealand, it is set up to monitor seismic activity in real-time pretty well, with seismographs, GPS sensors, and infrasound sensors.

"Whereas in the Pacific, the volcanoes that we can monitor in real-time, there's only a handful of them, and they are mainly in Vanuatu.

"We have a few new systems set up in Tonga now, but they're still nowhere near as as comprehensive as the monitoring systems we have in New Zealand."

Cronin said these kinds of tools "help us see things that we might not otherwise see".

He said once the AI tool picks something up, they can then bring in a human scientist.

"What we can do is then hone in on things and say, hey, there's something strange there, and then put a pair of human eyes on that, and put in the volcanological expertise.

"Anything that we can develop in the terms of AI software, types of approaches that are labour-saving approaches, or kind of pre-filtering and pre-screening approaches can be really, really helpful for countries without volcano scientists.

"Tonga, for example, where you have a small number of scientists in their group, and not many, one or two have been trained in volcano seismology and there aren't many that have very deep, in-depth training.

"We have people trained at masters level, but we don't have that many PhD level trained people in the South West Pacific, around the volcano monitoring.

"So any kind of tools that we have that help to automatically process signals and raise awareness about volcanoes that might be pressurizing towards eruption, I think is there's a great deal of assistance."

The programme was developed in response to Aotearoa's Whakaari/White Island tragedy where 22 people were killed and 45 injured.

Engineer Dr Alberto Ardid said the system was being developed "to help us to identify in real time and prevent what happened on Whakaari".

Ardid said the AI tool was fed 20 years' worth of seismic data recorded from 41 volcanic eruptions across the globe including from Whakaari, Tongariro, and Ruapehu in New Zealand.

He said the seismic tools were the same as those used to measure earthquakes, but near a volcano the recorded shaking typically related to subsurface volcanic activity such as magma movement, which could be a precursor to an eruption.

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