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Outdoor CO2 hazard at Puerto Naos and La Bombilla (La Palma, Canary Islands): a numerical modelling approach.

Luca D'Auria1,2,  Fabio Dioguardi3, María Asensio-Ramos1, Pedro A. Hernández1,2, Gladys Melián1,2, Germán Padilla1,2, Eleazar Padrón1,2, Nemesio M. Pérez1,2

  • Affiliations: 1Instituto Volcanológico de Canarias (INVOLCAN),Puerto de la Cruz, Tenerife, Canary Islands 2Instituto Tecnológico y de Energías Renovables (ITER), Granadilla de Abona, Tenerife, Canary Islands  3Università degli Studi di Bari "Aldo Moro", Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra e Geoambientali, Bari, Italy

  • Presentation type: Poster

  • Presentation time: Tuesday 16:30 - 18:30, Room Poster Hall

  • Poster Board Number: 68

  • Programme No: 6.3.27

  • Theme 6 > Session 3

Abstract

The 2021 Tajogaite eruption in Cumbre Vieja volcano (La Palma, Canary Islands) started on Sep. 19, 2021, and lasted 85 days, caused extensive damages. Since the middle of November 2021, some areas, located about 5 km SW of the eruptive centre have been affected by intense diffuse CO2 emission. Among them are the urban centres of La Bombilla and Puerto Naos. These emissions prevented the population of these two centres from returning to their houses because of high concentrations of CO2 in indoor and outdoor environments. In this work, we model the CO2 dispersion process in Puerto Naos to obtain hazard maps with the maximum CO2 concentrations in the outdoor. To achieve these results, we combined field measurements with numerical modelling, achieved using the software TWODEE-2, a code for modelling the dispersion of heavy gases based on the solution of shallow water equations. For this purpose, we used a detailed digital topographic model, including the edifices of Puerto Naos. We determined the gas emission rates from discrete source points in no-wind conditions using a trial-and-error approach. Subsequently, we repeated the numerical modelling, keeping the same sources and simulating all the realistic wind conditions in terms of direction and intensity. For each simulation, we determined the maximum CO2 concentration at different elevations from the ground. This allowed obtaining a hazard map with the maximum CO2 outdoor concentrations for each part of the town.