On March 19, 2009, seismologists at the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute saw a sharp rise in the number of earthquakes surrounding Alaska’s Redoubt Volcano, a 10,197-foot stratovolcano just 106 miles southwest of Anchorage. In the next three days, thousands of small earthquakes rattled the mountain. On March 21, the events detected by Alaska Volcano Observatory (AVO) monitoring systems prompted the AVO warning system color code to increase to level orange, indicating increased eruption potential. And sure enough, Redoubt soon began to blow.

Over the next 14 days, Redoubt Volcano had at least 19 separate explosive events—sending ash clouds as high as 62,000 feet, grounding hundreds of aircraft flights, stranding passengers and cargo, and costing the state of Alaska millions of dollars.

Ironically, this punctuated string of Redoubt explosions came at a time when federal funding for AVO—a cooperative program designed to monitor, forecast, understand and warn of Alaska’s volcanic hazards—is being drastically cut. Instead of receiving the approximately $8 million needed from Congress to operate AVO in 2009, the organization received little more than half of that money.

For the dozens of scientists and graduate students at UAF who are partially or completely supported by AVO funding, the sudden budget change nearly stopped the show. Much of AVO’s field work was eliminated and some staff have been partially reduced (temporarily) due to lack of money. But the AVO mission has not been interrupted.

For now, the university has taken steps to provide funding to keep AVO operations intact and allow them to continue most monitoring and emergency response procedures. Scientists at AVO are confident that there are other short-term funding options out there, including more funds from alternate federal sources. But these would be—at most—a temporary bandage. The long-term future funding base for AVO remains uncomfortably unclear.

Without UAF’s unique contributions to AVO, the nation would be ill-prepared to deal with Alaska’s impending volcanic hazards, including Redoubt. And remember that Redoubt is only one of more than 50 volcanoes in Alaska that have erupted since 1750.
 

The Alaska Volcano Observatory was formed in 1988 and consists of three separate organizations: the United States Geological Survey (USGS), the State of Alaska Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys (ADGGS) and the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (GI). The three organizations work cooperatively to operate AVO, and each has its own unique set of skills and tools to offer.

AVO’s USGS component is based in Anchorage, where 18 government-employed researchers work to understand and spread the news about Alaska’s volcanoes. Information from multiple sources is compiled and evaluated by the USGS—in close consultation with the GI and ADGGS—to assess the nature of the hazard and the degree of severity of any eruption. This information is quickly passed on to other federal agencies, including Volcanic Ash Advisory Centers at the National Weather Service and the Federal Aviation Administration. These agencies can then warn aircraft of airborne ash and alert ground-based facilities of potential ash fall. 

At AVO’s ADGGS offices in Fairbanks, five full-time geologists work primarily to catalog the history of Alaska’s volcanoes, maintain up-to-date geologic maps of these regions and act as the public interface through the AVO Web site. More often than not, this means extensive field work at volcanic sites throughout the state where ADGGS works with other AVO researchers to service AVO instruments and gather new geologic samples. New data are then analyzed and published for public consumption both in print and online. After Redoubt’s eruption in spring 2009, for example, ADGGS AVO will publish an updated geologic map and hazard assessment within the next five years. And during the month of March, when Redoubt activity was at its peak, the ADDGS Web site averaged one million page views per day.

At the University of Alaska Fairbanks GI, there are currently 20 part-time and full-time scientists including faculty, staff and graduate students who monitor, archive, and analyze all incoming volcanic data. This includes real-time data from continuously recording networks of seismometers on 31 of Alaska’s volcanoes and, at some volcanoes, GPS instruments, infrasound stations and lightning data. In addition, near-real-time satellite imagery monitors thermal anomalies and ash plumes at all volcanoes throughout Alaska and the North Pacific. These monitoring tools—combined with the GI’s capacity to do petrological research on volcanoes from the inside-out—constitute the GI’s role in AVO. GI scientists and staff also install instruments and perform fieldwork.

Until this year, the approximately $5 million in backbone funding for AVO came from the $20-some-million that Congress appropriated for the Volcano Hazards Program. The remaining funds went to operation of the Hawaiian, Cascades (Mount St. Helens), Yellowstone and Long Valley Caldera observatories, and for general volcano research and hazard mitigation activities. Beginning in 1996, Alaska’s Senator Ted Stevens earmarked an additional $2 million to $4 million in the Federal Aviation Administration’s budget specifically for volcano monitoring in Alaska.    

But with Stevens’ departure from power in Congress, the added funding for AVO
is no longer secure. In the past, as the budget fluctuated from year to year, cuts were typically spread throughout the three organizations that make up AVO.
But this year has been different, with ADDGS and GI faculty and staff
shouldering most of the budget burden.

Fortunately, AVO successfully applied for and received $3 million from the federal stimulus package that will provide a temporary bandage until 2011. This funding is specifically awarded to modernize networks and monitoring systems and reinstate field research in the short term. But it does not provide funding for basic day-to-day operations such as staff salaries. The long-term funding of AVO remains uncertain.

Arguably, without the solid monitoring, data collection and staff resources provided largely by the GI, AVO would be a very different organization. UAF’s horsepower, flexibility and education ultimately make AVO the organization that it is today.

AVO at UAF is broken informally into three interdisciplinary scientific groups: geophysics (seismology and geodesy), remote sensing and geology (including geochemistry). Each discipline has established monitoring tools that are crucial in volcanic emergencies. But because of UAF’s roots in research, GI AVO researchers take their work one step further: they also use non-AVO funds, such as external grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and NASA, to understand volcanic systems and to develop new and improved monitoring tools.

A big part of this extra-research-step is graduate students who provide the
power and the motivation to push the limits of volcano science. According to AVO coordinating scientist and GI seismologist Steve McNutt, UAF students “get a dose of how to do operational work in a real setting,” while helping develop new techniques. UAF graduate students keep AVO at the GI fresh and forward-thinking.

Students from each of UAF’s AVO disciplines played an active role in Redoubt monitoring and response. As one GI graduate student advisor put it, “The seismologists told us when it would erupt; the remote sensors told us how and where it erupted; and the geologists will tell us why it erupted in the first place.”

UAF seismology graduate student Helena Buurman was installing AVO seismometers on Redoubt Volcano the day before initial explosions began in March 2009. The instruments, which record the vibrations of the ground, sent information back to the GI in real time.

In the three days preceding Redoubt’s first explosion on March 22, the instruments installed by Buurman and others helped record the rapid rise in the number of earthquakes surrounding the mountain. Instead of the small handful of earthquakes typically recorded each day at Redoubt, thousands of earthquakes began rolling in, tipping researchers off that something was going to happen.

Redoubt is the most recent, but not necessarily the most unique, of Alaska’s many volcanoes that are monitored by UAF seismologists seven days a week. According to McNutt, the state sees two or three eruptions each year at one or more volcanoes. It is ultimately up to AVO seismologists to record and locate these events using networks spanning 1,700 miles across the North Pacific.

Six graduate students work with AVO’s four remote sensing faculty members to monitor the region’s volcanoes. “AVO provided the structure to encourage the development of remote sensing to monitor volcanic eruptions after it was formed in 1988,” says remote sensing lead scientist Ken Dean. “Before, eruptions were often detected by pilots, which is a dangerous situation since ash from drifting clouds ingested by aircraft engines can cause the engines to shut down. This happened in 1989 when a 747 passenger jet encountered ash north of Anchorage and came within a few thousand feet of the ground before two of the engines were restarted.” Today, some form of volcanic activity is detected daily during monitoring, and often at multiple volcanoes.

In the remote sensing volcano monitoring room at UAF, 12 flat-screen monitors display images as they are received by orbiting satellites. The data appear in two forms: thermal anomalies and ash clouds. Thermal anomalies—essentially warm spots on the ground—are often precursors to volcanic eruptions. The potentially harmful ash clouds can be detected and tracked as they move across the state.
When Redoubt Volcano erupted in March 2009, for example, clouds dropped ash in South Central Alaska and in the Interior of the state, near Healy. In addition, clouds of sulfur dioxide drifted east across the continent. Remote sensing scientists and students monitored these cloud movements. The team’s Puff Dispersion Model, a tool developed at UAF to predict where harmful volcanic clouds will travel, helped alert agencies relying on AVO as to where volcanic dangers could arise.

During the spring 2009 eruptions at Redoubt, UAF geologist Jessica Larsen and her graduate student, Sarah Henton, worked to rapidly analyze rock samples from the erupting volcano. Fellow researcher Pavel Izbekov collected ash samples in late March as they fell after individual explosions. Izbekov, Henton and Larsen then joined graduate student Jill Shipman to perform primary petrological analyses of the samples in the UAF Advanced Instrumentation Laboratory. Here, they learned how the rocks were formed in the volcano, and quickly passed this information along to the rest of AVO for the purposes of monitoring the ongoing eruption. Larsen and her team continue to research these samples today.

In Larsen’s opinion, the ability to involve UAF students directly in AVO eruption response and monitoring research is one thing that makes UAF’s contribution to AVO unique. Combined with the ability to secure NSF funding, UAF is in a unique position to “add value” to the core AVO mission. “UAF volcanology students have the unparalleled opportunity to be directly involved in eruption crisis research,” she explains, “and to share findings with our USGS and ADGGS colleagues, to help with the monitoring efforts.”

Larsen recently obtained NSF funds to involve Henton in a detailed experimental petrology study on rocks from the 2006 eruption of Augustine, in collaboration with USGS researcher Michelle Coombs. Thanks to NSF, this research will happen independent of the AVO budget woes, but will ultimately benefit future AVO monitoring.

Despite UAF’s critical role in AVO, long-term funding remains unclear. “We at AVO are like the frog boiling in a pot of water,” says geologist Jessica Larsen. “We just got really used to having what seemed like stable federal funding.” But now the heat is being noticed.

Other future funding options for AVO may include state sources, a University of Alaska Foundation fund, and integration of other university programs and organizations. But none of these options has advanced very far.

Perhaps the best bet for long-term AVO funding is the creation of the National Volcano Early Warning System (NVEWS)—a specialized piece of the existing Volcano Hazards Program that would centralize some of the monitoring systems for all active volcanoes in the United States. According to the USGS, about half of the nation’s 169 young volcanoes are potentially dangerous. The NVEWS would establish a systematic, nationwide monitoring system for these volcanic hazards. Because so many of the volcanoes are in Alaska, and because NVEWS would emphasize partnerships with universities, this initiative would be a big gain for AVO in general and hopefully UAF in particular.

When Redoubt erupted last spring, Alaska’s senators Lisa Murkowski and Mark Begich wrote a Senate bill to establish the NVEWS. As of October 2009, there is no word on where the bill is headed. Until a long-term funding source is secured, AVO’s three parts—UAF, ADGGS, and the USGS—will continue to work together from year to year and try to maintain operations and staff as the multi-disciplinary organization they were designed to be.