Space Apps Challenge 2018

Volcanoes affect people in many ways - some are good and some are not so good. Houses, buildings, roads, fields and any other structures can get covered with ash and lava flows.

Fast pyroclastic flows which is a mixtures of hot gas and ash can travel very quickly (100-200 km/hour) down the slopes of volcanoes and if you are caught in one it will kill you.

Volcanic ash ejected into the atmosphere by explosive eruptions has known damaging effects on aircraft. According to FAA Aviation Safety Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3:
"The ash erodes sharp blades in the compressor, reducing its efficiency. The ash melts in the combustion chamber to form molten glass. The ash then solidifies on turbine blades, blocking air flow and causing the engine to stall."

VOLCANIX currently monitors the earths 1,434 known volcanoes in near real time. Every hour the application gathers information about current eruptions, doing hot spot and seismic activity detection in the near proximity of the volcanoes. The application then calculates a threat score based on eruption/detections and the surrounding population in a radius of 5, 10, 30 and 100km. For ease and visualization the information is displayed on the world map using color codes and symbols and you also have the possibility to download the raw data for further analysis.

The application can easily run as standalone local program, run as a service on a server or launched on the web.

VOLCANIX is written in R as a Shiny application using:

• Leaflet for interactive maps with ArcGIS and Stamen as layers
  
• OpenWeatherMap for weather information
  

The volcano/eruption and detection data is gathered from:

• Global Volcanism Program, Smithsonian Institution
  
• LANCE FIRMS operated by the NASA/GSFC/Earth Science Data and Information
  
• The European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC)
  

The source code can be viewed and cloned/downloaded here on GitHub.