Seasonal Ground Deformation at Katla Volcano, Iceland: GNSS Observations and Models

Up to 7 cm of horizontal displacement was recorded at the Austmannsbunga GNSS station during a 2024 glacial outburst flood at Katla Volcano. This 347.9 KB PDF by Catherine O’Hara presents finite element models to quantify seasonal deformation from ice and snow unloading at the glacier-covered volcano. The work uses realistic bedrock topography and recent ice data from Mýrdalsjökull to separate volcanic from hydrological signals.

Use Cases

• Modeling seasonal ground deformation from snow and ice unloading based on the described finite element method.
• Separating hydrological from magmatic deformation signals at ice-covered volcanoes based on the described GNSS observations.
• Calibrating geophysical models with cm-scale horizontal and vertical displacement data from the Austmannsbunga station.
• Investigating the link between jökulhlaups (glacial outburst floods) and rapid surface deformation based on the 2024-2025 event analysis.

Strengths

• Includes specific deformation measurements, such as up to 4 cm horizontal and 3 cm vertical seasonal displacement.
• Models are based on realistic bedrock topography and recent ice unloading data from Mýrdalsjökull.
• Analyzes a notable recent event, recording 7 cm of horizontal displacement during the 2024 jökulhlaup.

Limitations

• The dataset is a single 347.9 KB PDF; the underlying raw GNSS time-series data or model inputs are not directly provided.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred from the paper's text.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for direct ML training.

Provenance

Source

Catherine O’Hara, published on figshare.

Collection Method

Observations from Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) stations and elastic three-dimensional finite element method modeling.

Time Range

Analysis includes events from 1918 to 2025, with focus on recent jökulhlaups in 2024-2025.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-03 06:00:31.

Geography

Katla Volcano under the Mýrdalsjökull glacier, Iceland.