È VIVO: Virtual eruptions at Vesuvius; A multimedia tool to illustrate numerical modeling to a general public

摘要

Dissemination of scientific results to the general public has become increasingly important in our society. When science deals with natural hazards, public outreach is even more important: on the one hand, it contributes to hazard perception and it is anecessary step toward preparedness and risk mitigation; on the other hand, it contributes to establish a positive link of mutualconfidence between scientific community and the population living at risk. The existence of such a link plays a relevant role inhazard communication, which in turn is essential to mitigate the risk. In this work, we present a tool that we have developed toillustrate our scientific results on pyroclastic flow propagation at Vesuvius. This tool, a CD-ROM that we developed joiningscientific data with appropriate knowledge in communication sciences is meant to be a first prototype that will be used to test thevalidity of this approach to public outreach. The multimedia guide contains figures, images of real volcanoes and computeranimations obtained through numerical modeling of pyroclastic density currents. Explanatory text, kept as short and simple aspossible, illustrates both the process and the methodology applied to study this very dangerous natural phenomenon. In this firstversion, the CD-ROM will be distributed among selected categories of end-users together with a short questionnaire that we havedrawn to test its readability. Future releases will include feedback from the users, further advancement of scientific results as well as a higher degree of interactivity.