Abstract

The systematic study of the world's most frequent volcanic activity is a compelling and productive arena for orbital remote sensing techniques, informing a range of investigations from basic volcanology to societal risk assessments. The Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection radiometer (ASTER--a joint project of Japan and the United States), with its high spatial resolution (15, 30, 90m/pixel), multispectral character (0.52-0.86 microns; 1.6-2.4 microns; 8.1-11.6 microns), and stereophotogrammetric capability is in many ways an ideal imaging instrument for this task. Since launch in December 1999, an ASTER volcano target list of over 1500 volcanoes has yielded a (still growing) inventory of over 140,000 volcano views on over 70,000 individual ASTER day and night images. A significant emerging challenge for ASTER is how to effectively access a burgeoning data archive in a way that allows the survey, extraction, and distribution of important information in a timely way. This issue is particularly acute in general for ASTER, which has produced a multi-spectral, high spatial resolution, feature-specific targeted global data base of over 1 million image data granules worldwide. To promptly and efficiently access and manage voluminous volcano data within a large ASTER image library, and to house other ancillary correlative volcanological data from MISR, MODIS, EO-1 data sets, SRTM, and related in situ data, we have created a specialty domain called the JPL ASTER Volcano Archive (AVA: http://ava.jpl.nasa.gov). We will discuss and illustrate the myriad challenges and scientific opportunities that this unprecedentedly large, but accessible, global volcanological remote sensing data set represents in terms of data mining, data analysis, and data distribution to the scientific community, to disaster responders, the general public, and to educators, and will conduct a live AVA demonstration. This work was performed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory-California Institute of Technology, under contract to NASA.