Integration of thermal anomaly monitoring into a mobile volcano fast response system

Abstract

Chances of successfully forecasting volcanic eruptions are critically dependent on a careful monitoring strategy. A mobile volcano fast responses system (Exupéry) is currently under development by a larger group of scientist in Germany. In addition to commonly monitored parameters this system attempts to directly include satellite based observations into the monitoring strategy of the mobile system. Among the remote sensing retrievals are thermal anomaly temperature and area that often contain a large error. Thus a new strategy of supplying thermal anomaly characteristics into the GIS database is being developed. Radiant flux computed from temperature and area of the thermal anomaly was chosen as the best estimator of the thermal activity. Trying to relax inter-channel co-registration and reducing the effect of the point spread function, the whole thermal anomaly is now not characterized single pixel-wise but as a cluster. In order to reduce the noise in the measurements and to improve the temporal resolution of the data, AVHRR and MODIS data are used simultaneously. The procedure has been so far tested in the case study of Etna volcano.