Abstract
During the past two decades, the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument on the Terra satellite has acquired nearly 320,000 scenes of the world’s volcanoes. This is ~10% of the data in the global ASTER archive. Many of these scenes captured volcanic activity at never before seen spatial and spectral scales, particularly in the thermal infrared (TIR) region. Despite this large archive of data, the temporal resolution of ASTER is simply not adequate to understand ongoing eruptions and assess the hazards to local populations in near real time. However, programs designed to integrate ASTER into a volcanic data sensor web have greatly improved the cadence of the data (in some cases, to as many as 3 scenes in 48 h). This frequency can inform our understanding of what is possible with future systems collecting similar data on the daily or hourly time scales. Here, we present the history of ASTER’s contributions to volcanology, highlighting unique aspects of the instrument and its data. The ASTER archive was mined to provide statistics including the number of observations with volcanic activity, its type, and the average cloud cover. These were noted for more than 2000 scenes over periods of 1, 5 and 20 years.
Highlights
IntroductionThe data from spaceborne sensors used to detect, monitor, and even forecast eruptions have been analyzed since the earliest days of the satellite era, e.g., [13–15]
The Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument was launched on the NASA Terra satellite on 18 December 1999
Prior to the instrument beginning its operational phase on 4 March 2000, ASTER acquired several images including the first thermal infrared (TIR) image on 6 February (Figure 1)
Summary
The data from spaceborne sensors used to detect, monitor, and even forecast eruptions have been analyzed since the earliest days of the satellite era, e.g., [13–15]. The ability to extract critical information from subtle phases of precursory activity in order to perform the detailed spectral mapping of the erupted products grew exponentially [16]. Many of these studies describe the detection of a new thermal anomaly at a quiescent volcano, which gave rise to models of the sub-pixel temperature distribution. Ramsey and Harris [17] summarized the history of satellite-based TIR research of active volcanoes into four broad themes: (1) thermal detection, (2) analysis of sub-pixel components, (3) heat/mass flux studies, and (4) eruption chronologies. Ramsey [2] added a fifth theme, the creation of sensor webs consisting of integrated data from multiple sensors to improve the spatial and/or temporal resolution
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