Support to Aviation Control Service (SACS): an online service for near-real-time satellite monitoring of volcanic plumes

Abstract

Abstract. Volcanic eruptions emit plumes of ash and gases into the atmosphere, potentially at very high altitudes. Ashrich plumes are hazardous for airplanes as ash is very abrasive and easily melts inside their engines. With more than 50 active volcanoes per year and the ever-increasing number of commercial flights, the safety of airplanes is a real concern. Satellite measurements are ideal for monitoring global volcanic activity and, in combination with atmospheric dispersion models, to track and forecast volcanic plumes. Here we present the Support to Aviation Control Service (SACS, http: //sacs.aeronomie.be), which is a free online service initiated by the European Space Agency (ESA) for the near-real-time (NRT) satellite monitoring of volcanic plumes of SO 2 and ash. It combines data from three ultraviolet (UV)-visible and three infrared (IR) spectrometers. The UV-vis sensors are the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) and the Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment-2 (GOME-2) on-board the two polar orbiting meteorological satellites (MetOp-A & MetOp-B) operated by the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT). The IR sensors are the Atmospheric InfraRed Sounder (AIRS) and the Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI) onboard MetOp-A & MetOp-B. This new multi-sensor warning system of volcanic emissions is based on the selective detection of SO 2 and ash. This system is optimised to avoid false alerts while at the same time limiting the number of notifications in case of large plumes. A successful rate with more than 95 % of notifications corresponding to true volcanic activity is obtained by the SACS system.

Sulfur dioxide retrievals from TROPOMI onboard Sentinel-5 Precursor: algorithm theoretical basis

“…Total vertical column density (VCD) of SO 2 has been retrieved with the sensors TOMS (Krueger, 1983), GOME (Eisinger and Burrows, 1998;Thomas et al, 2005;Khokar et al, 2005), SCIAMACHY (Afe et al, 2004), OMI (Krotkov et al, 2006;Yang et al, 2007Yang et al, , 2010Li et al, 2013;Theys et al, 2015), GOME-2 Bobrowski et al, 2010;Nowlan et al, 2011;Rix et al, 2012;Hörmann et al, 2013) and OMPS . In particular, the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) has largely demonstrated the value of satellite UV-visible remote sensing (1) in monitoring volcanic plumes in near-real time (Brenot et al, 2014) and changes in volcanic degassing at the global scale , and references therein) and (2) in detecting and quantifying large anthropogenic SO 2 emissions, weak or N. Theys et al: S-5P SO 2 algorithm theoretical basis unreported emission sources worldwide (Theys et al, 2015;Fioletov et al, 2016;McLinden et al, 2016) as well as investigating their long-term changes van der A et al, 2016;He et al, 2016). An example map of OMI SO 2 columns (Theys et al, 2015) averaged over the [2005][2006][2007][2008][2009] period is shown in Fig.…”

Are EARLINET and AERONET climatologies consistent? The case of Thessaloniki, Greece

“…The knowledge of the climatological behavior of particles in the troposphere can be utilized in many different ways. Its applications can range from purely scientific, such as the validation of aerosol transportation and air quality models (e.g., Binietoglou et al, 2015;Siomos et al, 2017) and satellite instruments (e.g., Balis et al, 2016), to civilly oriented, for example the impact of the aerosol load on human health (e.g., Mauderly and Chow, 2008;Löndahl et al, 2010), airfare safety (e.g., Brenot et al, 2014), and agriculture (e.g., Gerstl and Zardecki, 1982).…”

A 15-year record (2001–2015) of the ratio of nitrate to non-seasalt sulfate in precipitation over East Asia

“…Recently, satellite observations have been widely used as a proxy for emissions data. NO 2 column have been used to capture NOx emissions (e.g., Miyazaki et al, 2012;Mijling et al, 2013;Itahashi et al, 2014b;Han et al, 2015;Irie et al, 2016) and SO 2 25 column for SO 2 emissions (e.g., Lee et al, 2011;Li et al, 2010) and/or volcanic eruptions (e.g., Brenot et al, 2014). Several studies have indicated the importance of different technologies to control emissions (e.g., Li et al, 2010;Wang et al, 2015;Krotkov et al, 2016;van der A et al, 2017).…”

“…We discarded two data periods associated with volcanic activities from our analysis, as follows. The Sarychev Volcano in the 20 Kuril Islands (48.09°N, 153.20°E) had an explosive eruption that emitted a huge amount of ash and SO 2 at altitudes of [10][11][12][13][14][15][16] km (Brenot et al, 2014). The data from 14-22 June 2009 included this large amount of SO 2 (over 10 D.U.)…”

“…An eruption of the Nabro Volcano in Eritrea (13.37°N, 41.07°E) during 12 June-7 July 2011 was also reported. During the night of 12 June 2011, this volcano started to erupt, and on 14 June 2011, it spewed a volcanic plume across the route of many flights over 25 east Africa and the Middle East (Brenot et al, 2014). The data from 15 June to 9 July 2011 were excluded from the calculation of monthly and annual mean data according to the approach detailed in van der A et al (2017).…”