Inverting Sediment Bedforms for Exploring the Hazard of Volcanic Density Currents Directly in the Field

Pyroclastic density currents are ground hugging gas-particle flows moving at high speed down the volcano slope. They are among the most hazardous events of explosive volcanism, causing devastation and deaths 1,2 . Because of the hostile nature they cannot be analyzed directly and most of their fluid dynamic behavior is reconstructed by the deposits left in the geological record, which frequently show peculiar structures such as bedforms of the types of ripples and dunes 3,4 . In this paper, we simplify a set of equations that link flow behavior to particle motion and deposition. This allows, for the first time, the build up of a phase diagram by which the hazard of dilute pyroclastic density currents can be explored easily and quickly by inverting bedforms wavelength and grain size.