Quantifying daily volcanic SO2 emissions on a global scale with TROPOMI and PlumeTraj
Ben Esse 1, Mike Burton1, Catherine Hayer2, Manuel Queißer1
Affiliations: 1 COMET, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK 2 HAMTEC for EUMETSAT, Darmstadt, Germany
Presentation type: Talk
Presentation time: Friday 16:00 - 16:15, Room S150
Programme No: 3.17.10
Abstract
The expression of volcanic activity at the Earth's surface is accompanied by the emission of a cocktail of different gases, including water, carbon dioxide, sulphur species and halogens. The composition and magnitude of these emissions reflects the state of magmatic systems, providing insights into volcanic processes and key hazard monitoring information. The primary target species for quantification of volcanic emissions is SO2, due to its high prevalence in volcanic emissions, its low typical atmospheric concentration and the ability to measure it remotely from both ground and space. Satellite instruments provide a global view of volcanic activity, which is particularly useful for remote or difficult to reach volcanoes, or those without dedicated monitoring networks. In this work we combine daily SO2 imagery from TROPOMI with the PlumeTraj trajectory analysis toolkit to detect and quantify daily eruptive and non-eruptive SO2 emissions from volcanoes globally throughout 2020. We consistently detect more than 20 degassing volcanoes per day, dominated by persistent non-eruptive emissions. These results demonstrate the ability of TROPOMI and PlumeTraj to provide daily automatic SO2 emissions for volcanoes globally. This will generate an invaluable dataset of volcanic degassing for investigating volcanic processes and characterising SO2 emissions as a function of latitude and altitude, an important input for global climate modelling. In the future the presented workflow could also be applied in near real-time, providing a valuable monitoring tool.