LAVA FLOW EMPLACEMENT PROCESSES: AUTOMATING HAZARD MODELING IN THE NEXT ERA OF ORBITAL INFRARED SENSORS

In her distinguished career, Kathy Cashman has studied a wide variety of volcanic processes using petrology, modeling, and geophysics. Although remote sensing was not a primary tool in her toolkit, it does provide important information on many of the questions that she studied. For several decades, the University of Pittsburgh’s Image Visualization and Infrared Spectroscopy (IVIS) group has focused on thermal infrared (TIR) data from the laboratory, ground, and space to address a range of questions from the flow’s petrology and hazard assessment to the long-term thermal trends at active volcanoes. For example, as a lava flow cools through the solidus, glass formation and mineral crystallization change its infrared emissivity – a fundamental parameter that is determined by the composition, and which affects its heat loss efficiency. We have developed new laboratory and field-based instruments to quantify this behavior at spatial and temporal scales relevant to the volcanic processes. High temperature, hyperspectral laboratory TIR spectroscopy, for example, allows us to quantify emissivity changes from a liquid to a glassy solid. Furthermore, multispectral TIR cameras capture image data in situ of dynamic processes smaller than those seen by satellite-based sensors. Finally, the heat flux from a vent that is actively emplacing a flow can be retrieved from ground and orbital TIR data and used with thermorheological hazard models that predict its direction, cooling, and runout distance. We, along with colleagues in Italy and France, have focused over the years on automating the workflow from the lab to space to identify new vents, determine the discharge rate, and initiate flow path modeling in real time. This is in lead up to the next decade, where several new orbital TIR sensors are planned with the promise of improved spatial (60 m) and vastly improved temporal (1-3 days) resolution. These sensors will also have volcano-specific products for the first time and will usher in a new era of orbital volcanology if we are prepared for the increased data volume. We predict that these data will answer in near real time and over global scales many of the questions that Kathy has studied.