Observing the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull, Iceland, Eruptions with NASA's Earth Observing-1 Spacecraft - Improving Data Flow In a Volcanic Crisis Through Use of Autonomy

Eyjafjallajökull volcano, Iceland, erupted from 20 March to 12 April 2010 (a flank eruption) and again from 14 April to 23 May 2010. The latter eruption heavily impacted air travel across much of northern Europe, and highlighted the need to monitor and quickly react to new eruptions. The NASA Earth Observing 1 spacecraft (EO-1), which is managed by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, obtained over 50 observation pairs with the Hyperion hyperspectral imager and ALI (Advanced Land Imager) multispectral camera. EO-1 is the remote-sensing asset of a globe-spanning Volcano Sensor Web [1], where low spatial resolution data (e.g., MODIS) or alerts of ongoing or possible volcanic activity are used to trigger requests for high resolution EO-1 data. Advanced resource management software, developed in part for flight onboard EO-1 as part of the Autonomous Sciencecraft [2, 3] is now used to task EO-1. This system allowed rapid re-tasking of EO-1 to obtain both day and night data at high temporal resolution (on average every 2 days), unusual for such high spatial resolution imagers (Hyperion and ALI at 30 m/pixel, with an ALI panchromatic band at 10 m/pixel). About 50% of the data were impacted by cloud. Advances in data handling and communications during the last two years means that Hyperion and ALI data are typically on the ground and ready for analysis within a few hours of data acquisition. Automatic data processing systems at the NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory process Hyperion data to (1) correct for atmospheric adsorption; (2) remove the sunlight component in daytime data; (3) identify hot pixels; (4) fit unsaturated data to determine temperature and area of sub-pixel thermal sources; (5) calculate total thermal emission and, from this, an effusion rate; (6) generate geo-located data products. The entire process is autonomous. Data products, as well as images generated, were sent to volcanologists in the field to aid in eruption assessment. The JPL group is now working with Icelandic scientists to develop a mechanism for triggering EO-1 observations from Icelandic Meteorological Office and University of Iceland in situ instruments. References: [1] Davies, A. G., et al., 2006, Eos, 87 (1), 1&5. [2] Chien, S. et al., 2005, J. Aerospace Computing, Information, & Communication, 2005, AIAA, 2, 196-216. [3] Davies, A. G. et al., 2006, Rem. Sens. Environ., 101, no. 4, 427-446. This work was performed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract to NASA.