The Twenty Five Years of “Volcanic Activity Monitoring”—Observations and Results

Abstract

February 2, 2025 marked the 25th anniversary since the start of the Monitoring of Volcanic Activity project conducted by the Kamchatka Branch (KB) of the Geophysical Survey (GS) of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS). At present time the studies are being conducted in near real time in four directions: (1) seismicity monitoring, (2) visual and video observations, (3) satellite-based monitoring, and (4) infrasound control. The daily work conducted by the Kamchatka Branch to acquire, to process, and to present the information on volcanic activity enables timely and reasonable assessment of the state of volcanoes, yielding conclusions as to possible developments of volcanic activity. The monitoring results are daily published in the factual database “Activity of Kamchatka Volcanoes”. The original variant of the database using pages in the html format did not envisage full-scale research using the stored observation and processing results; for this reason a new database was developed in 2014 for the Eruptions of Volcanoes in Kamchatka and on the Kuril Islands system, in addition to a package of program modules for data processing. The observation and processing results systematized for the 25 years of this work provided for and helped achieve successes in dealing with problems arising in short-term prediction of strong paroxysmal eruptions on Bezymianny, Klyuchevskoi, and Kizimen volcanoes. For the case of such rarely erupting volcanoes as, e.g., Koryaksky, Avachinsky, Mutnovsky, Gorely, Plosky Tolbachik, and Kambalny, the work involved recording and systematizing seismic and other geophysical data, which will contribute to a better assessment of their volcanic hazard in the future.