| This bulletin marks the tenth anniversary of the May 18, 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens by describing many of the monitoring techniques used since then to track the volcano's ongoing activity. All the chapters in this volume were written by technicians and scientists who are now or were at some time in the past 10 years members of the Cascades Volcano Observatory (CVO), which was established in Vancouver, Washington, in the summer of 1980 in response to the eruption of nearby Mount St. Helens. The chapters in the bulletin describe the techniques and strategies employed by CVO's staff to collect data used to monitor volcanic activity and predict eruptive activity at Mount St. Helens, as well as other volcanoes in the United states, Latin America, and New Zealand. The chapters focus on the methods for acquiring and managing data, not on the interpretations resulting from the data. We anticipate that the audience of the bulletin will be those scientists and technicians, particularly in developing countries, who themselves are, or will be, monitoring volcanoes. The bulletin is not intended to be a comprehensive text on volcano monitoring but instead a distillation of how CVO's staff responded both to the need to monitor an active composite volcano and to the dynamic technological developments during the 1980's. -- Ewert and Swanson, (eds.), 1992 |
