Automated Volcano Monitoring Using Multiple Space and Ground Sensors

What is it about?

From 2004 to 2017, an effort was undertaken to integrate space-borne sensing and in-situ sensing in an automated system to improve global volcano activity monitoring. We describe a sensor web concept in which a number of volcano monitoring systems were linked together to more accurately monitor volcanic activity, and used this activity measurement to automatically task space assets to acquire further satellite imagery of the detected volcanic activity. We discuss the space and ground sensors and how they were linked together as triggers and responses. During 13 years, more than 160000 alerts coming from various sources lead to 9050 satellite observations by NASA’s Earth Observing One (EO-1) satellite - imaging about 200 volcanoes. We describe the science products automatically produced on board the satellite and on the ground such as temperature and lava flow estimates that are automatically subsequently delivered to subscribing users. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of out tasked volcano monitoring system we compare the hit rate of our tasked monitoring system to the systematic monitoring system MODVOLC.

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