During the 1990's, the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (INDNDR), the International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth's Interior (IAVCEI) has instigated a Decade Volcano program, whereby nations with active or potentially active volcanoes can designate a particularly dangerous volcano for detailed study (INDNDR Task Group, 1990). The U.S. proposed two, Mount Rainier for the contiguous states and Mauna Loa on Hawaii. Taal, rather than Pinatubo, is the choice of the Philippines, a decision underlined by the fact that both 1993 and 1994 have seen seismic and deformation crises at Taal, and in both cases people were evacuated from Volcano Island in Taal Lake.
The Decade Volcano program is actively generating considerable field and remote data collection and research, both at home and abroad. In April and October 1994, the Space Shuttle radar SIR-C/X-SAR experiments ( Evans et al., 1993) included coverage of 12 out of the 15 Decade volcanoes, including Taal, Etna, and Mauna Loa. The ongoing eruptions of Kliuchevskoi, Rabaul, and Kilauea were also imaged during the October mission. In addition, many volcanoes were imaged using the radar as an interferometer, which will enable high resolution digital topographic maps to be generated. Other orbital instruments, notably field spectrometers and the Landsat thematic mapper, have been used to study the thermal properties of hot spots and fumarole fields at Etna and Vesuvius ( Oppenheimer et al., 1993b), the latter being the Decade Volcano of Italy ( De Vivo et al., 1993). A series of TOMS instruments is planned for launch between 1995 and 1998, permitting a more complete assessment of the global distribution of sulfur dioxide from volcanoes ( Bluth et al., 1993).
Starting in 1998, a new series of 23 spacecraft will start to fly as part of the NASA Earth Observing System (EOS). One of the interdisciplinary EOS investigations is a study of volcanoes, volcanic hazards, and the volcanic inputs into the atmosphere ( Mouginis-Mark et al., 1991).
Obviously there is still a need to predict eruptions in the short term. An untimely explosion during a Decade Volcano hazard workshop field trip to the crater of Galeras volcano, Colombia, in January 1993, killed six volcanologists. Pyroclastic flows caused by andesitic lava fountaining and lava flow collapse also caused several tens of casualties and damaged agricultural land around Mayon volcano on Luzon, Philippines, in February 1993.