I've always been fascinated with volcanic eruptions, but it's important to remind that these phenomena can produce strong socio-economic impacts to population and human activities. In particular, my research is focused on impacts of volcanic ash dispersal on civil aviation, made evident during the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajokull Volcano (Iceland), that produced more than 2 Billion losses and disrupted air traffic in Europe for more than 3 weeks.

My PhD research was developed within the environmental simulation group at the BSC, leaded by Arnau Folch (https://www.bsc.es/about-bsc/staff-directory/folch-arnau). At the BSC,  we simulate tephra dispersal from volcanic eruptions using the numerical model FALL3D (http://bsccase02.bsc.es/projects/fall3d/), developed by Antonio Costa, Arnau Folch and Gianni Macedonio (Costa et al., 2006; Folch et al., 2009).

Numerical simulation of tephra dispersal in atmosphere allows producing maps of expected ash presence in a given area. Results are produced in binary format and store many variables and their temporal series, but can be processed in order to obtain maps. This is an example of result of a simulation, post-processed using open source GIS programs (QGIS, http://www.qgis.org/en/site/, and GRASS, http://grass.osgeo.org/).