Great Balls of Fire (GBF) is a collection of codes to assess the hazard caused by the impact of volcanic ballistic projectiles. It contains a ballistic model written in Scala and post-processing functions written in Matlab used to generate a range of probabilistic outputs.
The repository contains the following files:
| File | Description |
|---|---|
gbf.jar |
Compiled version of the ballistic model |
processGBF.m |
Function to post process model outputs |
displayGBF.m |
Function to display processed outputs |
MANUAL.pdf |
Complete user manual |
README.md |
This file |
LICENSE.md |
License file |
simulator/ |
The source code to the GBF model |
dependencies/ |
Dependencies to the Matlab functions |
example_run/ |
Example of input files |
gbf.jar is the compiled version of the GBF model.
The repository already contains a ready-to-use .jar file. To compile GBF from source, first download the sbt from here and follow:
$ sbt
> compile
> oneJarThe resulting .jar file will be located in the target/scala-2.11/ directory. Note that the first time the project is built, all necessary libraries will be downloaded. This may take several minutes, but successive builds will be much faster.
GBF requires two inputs (see examples in the folder example_run):
- A configuration file (
input.conf) - A DEM file in an ArcMap ASCII raster format (
DEM.txt)
For details on input parameters, refer to the file GBF_manual.pdf. The general command to run the model is:
java -jar gbf.jar conf_file nb_workerswhere conf_file is the path to the configuration file and nb_workers is the number of requested CPU cores. To run the example run with 4 workers, use:
java -jar gbf.jar example_run/input.conf 4The output file is an ASCII file where each line is a different VBP and columns are the following variables:
| Column | Variable |
|---|---|
| Column 1 | Eastern coordinate of the i-esim clast [m] |
| Column 2 | Western coordinate of the i-esim clast [m] |
| Column 3 | Altitude on the DEM of the i-esim clast [m] |
| Column 4 | Mass of the i-esim clast [kg] |
| Column 5 | Diameter of the i-esim clast [m] |
| Column 6 | Kinetic energy of the i-esim clast at the impact [J] |
| Column 7 | Incident angle at the impact [degrees] |
| Column 8 | Ejection angle of the i-esim clast with respect to the vertical [degrees] |
| Column 9 | Azimuthal angle of ejection, measured from north to east clockwise [degrees] |
| Column 10 | Initial velocity of the i-esim clast [m/s] |
| Column 11 | Total time of flight of the i-esim clast [s] |
The model output can be post-processed in Matlab using the processGBF.m file, the output of which can be displayed using the function displayGBF.m. A comprehensive description of the post-processing method can be found in this blog entry.
Instructions are provided in the the file included documentation. Additional instructions on the post-processing of VBP data are also provided in this blog post. Updates are presented here.
Jun 2019: Added columns to GBF output file and remodeled repository Apr 2018: Changes in the definition of the source and new post-processing functions Nov 2016: First release
Please cite GBF as:
Sébastien Biass, Jean-Luc Falcone, Costanza Bonadonna, Federico Di Traglia, Marco Pistolesi, Mauro Rosi, Pierino Lestuzzi, Great Balls of Fire: A probabilistic approach to quantify the hazard related to ballistics — A case study at La Fossa volcano, Vulcano Island, Italy, Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research, 325, 2016, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jvolgeores.2016.06.006.
GBF is a free and open source software releaser under GPL 3. See the
documentation or the file LICENSE.txt for further information.