Colin Rowell

I study volcanic eruption plumes, and their eventual impact on climate. In particular, I'm interested in the role of water (gas, liquid, and solid) in influencing the physics and chemistry of rising eruption clouds. These properties in turn directly control the ability of volcanic plumes to deliver ash and climate-altering gases to the upper atmosphere. Water is incorporated into volcanic plumes in three distinct ways: as dissolved water already present in magma, as vapour in the ambient atmosphere, or as surface water that comes into contact with erupting magma, such as a lake, ocean, or glacier. We know that volcanic eruptions can have large impacts on global climate - can local climate, particularly the hydrosphere, in turn influence eruption behaviour, creating local or global feedbacks? I aim to understand how the relative amount of water in the plume changes the height and distribution of resulting volcanic clouds. This information is in turn useful in understanding how these clouds will spread in the atmosphere, affecting local populations, air traffic, and global climate.

I approach these questions in a couple of different ways - through both numerical modeling of eruption processes, and through a combination of physics and machine-learning techniques to analyze field data such as ground-based thermal infrared imagery of eruption plumes. Here are some examples of recent projects:

1.  In analyzing thermal infrared video imagery of ash plumes at Sabancaya Volcano, Peru, I've developed an algorithm that uses spectral clustering (an form of unsupervised machine learning) to track time-evolving turbulent vortices as they rise from the volcanic vent.  Tracking how these vortices evolve in time enables us to understand how time-evolving conditions at the vent influence the behavior of the plume itself as it rises.  This approach is teaching us key principles for interpreting plume behavior in real-time from monitoring data, since many eruptions (and particularly those involving a lot of interaction with surface water!) evolve rapidly between difference eruptive styles.
2. In the modeling world, I've developed techniques to study the dynamics of erupting jets of ash and steam as the punch through layers of liquid water. This allows us to connect predictions of the plume behavior - both the character of ash particles, water, and sulfur dioxide, and where they are dispersed in the environment - to influences from water abundance in the local surface environment. We showed for example, that the climate impacts of water-rich eruptions are likely to be inherently very different from those of "dry" or purely magmatic eruptions. This rapidly proved to be highly relevant - just weeks before our paper was published in Frontiers of Earth Science, the powerful eruption of the shallow submarine volcano, Hunga-Tonga Hunga-Ha'apai clearly demonstrated the unusual water and sulfur chemistry of water rich eruption clouds.
3. Together with my student mentee, Meghan Sharp, we recently used this approach for modeling water-rich eruptions to reconstruct processes of the 1918 subglacial eruption of Katla Volcano, Iceland. We developed a framework for linking the behavior of an eruption plume to the subglacial drainage conditions that govern the transport of meltwater from the eruption site. By constraining our models with the wealth of information provided by eyewitness accounts from this 100-year-old eruption, we were able to link the timing of flood and ashfall hazards to eruption and melting processes as they occurred at the vent, tens of kilometers away from any witnesses.
4. Prior to arriving at UBC, my background was in acoustics, seismology, and signal processing. During my Master's degree I worked with members of the Alaska Volcano Observatory to understand and interpret the sound waves generated by explosive volcanic eruptions.

Outside of my research roles, I also served as a founding member of the EOAS Department committee responsible for engaging with the UBC Climate Emergency Response plan.