Opportunities Offered by the MTG Flexible Combined Imager for Volcano Monitoring

Monitoring of active volcanoes, by combining field observations, satellite data and numerical models, presents extraordinarily challenging problems, from detecting and quantifying hazardous phenomena during eruptive events to forecasting their impact to assess risks to people and property. At INGV Osservatorio Etneo in Catania, the CL-HOTSAT system [1] was designed and implemented in order to follow the manifestation of volcanic activity by using data from spaceborne thermal systems such as those acquired by MODIS, VIIRS, SLSTR, and SEVIRI sensors. Among these, the geostationary SEVIRI was able to track the evolution of short-lived events such as the lava fountains occurring at Mt Etna [2] or the paroxysmal events in Stromboli [3] . Anyway, because of the low spatial resolution of SEVIRI images (3 km at nadir, sub-satellite point at the center of the disc), most of the lower intensity thermal activity, such as those related to strombolian activity, spattering or small lava flows could not be detected. Another issue is that in case of intense eruptive activity the SEVIRI channel 4 (3.9 µm), useful to observe high temperature features, often saturates, causing a possible underestimation in the recorded signal.