Visualizing Earth's Erupting Volcanoes and Wildfires: Seven Years of Data From the Earth Observing Mission

Robert Wright, Eric Pilger, Luke P Flynn, Andrew JL Harris

Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, University of Hawaii, 1680 East-West Road, Honolulu, HI 96822, United States

Volcanic eruptions and wildfires are natural hazards that are truly global in their geographic scope, as well as being temporally very dynamic. As such, satellite remote sensing lends itself to their effective detection and monitoring. The results of such mapping can be communicated in the form of traditional static maps. However, most hazards have strong time-dependent forcing mechanisms (in the case of biomass burning, climate) and the dynamism of these geophysical phenomena requires a suitable method for their presentation. Here, we present visualizations of the amount of thermal energy radiated by all of Earth's sub-aerially erupting volcanoes, wildfires and industrial heat sources over a seven year period. These visualizations condense the results obtained from the near-real-time analysis of over 1.2 million MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectro-radiometer) images, acquired from NASA's Terra and Aqua platforms.

In the accompanying poster we will describe a) the raw data, b) how these data can be used to derive higher-order geophysical parameters, and c) how the visualization of these derived products adds scientific value to the raw data. The visualizations reveal spatio-temporal trends in fire radiated energy (and by proxy, biomass combustion rates and carbon emissions into the atmosphere), which are indiscernible in the static data set. Most notable are differences in biomass combustion between the North American and Eurasian Boreal forests. We also give examples relating to the development of lava flow-fields at Mount Etna (Italy) and Kilauea (USA), as well as variations in heat output from Iraqi oil fields, that span the onset of the 2003 Persian Gulf War. The raw data used to generate these visualizations are routinely made available via the Internet, as portable ASCII files. They can therefore be easily integrated with image datasets, by other researchers, to create their own visualizations.
 

URLS:
http://hotspot.higp.hawaii.edu/
http://modis.higp.hawaii.edu/