[Music]
[Volcano Rumbling]
[Music]
>>To my right you can see the pristine Hawaiian
atmosphere- beautiful blue sky, scattered
meteorological clouds.
But as we pan over, then we see the rising
volcanic gas from Halemaumau.
And this is primarily sulfur dioxide and then
steam, in this case, coming out of the vent,
roughly, 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, the gas
rises of thermal buoyancy until it equilibrates
with the surrounding air, the same temperature,
and then we bend over and become entrained
with the wind patterns.
The SO2 and sulfur dioxide gas reacts with
the atmosphere to form sulfate aerosols.
And these are very dangerous to human health,
both from breathing, and also form corrosive
acids.
This noxious mixture is called volcanic smog
or vog.
Right now the vog models are initialized by
point sources.
But we can measure the two-dimensional distribution
of sulfur dioxide at the plume source from
the satellites and the aircraft through our
remote sensing which then helps make more
accurate estimates of how it will be dispersed.
So we're hoping to improve these volcanic
forecast models.
On the ground we're making measurements to
help validate or collaborate the data we get
from the aircraft.
[Car driving]
>>What I like about the landscapes on volcanoes
is the strange shapes, forms, colors of lava
flows, of ash flows, of all these different
volcanic surfaces that very slowly get re-inhabited
by vegetation.
It's an interesting thing to see.
[Music]
I grew up on an island volcano in Greece.
An extinct volcano, not a very active volcano,
but I had the chance many years later, in
graduate school then, to come along on a trip
to the Philippines a few years after Mount
Pinatubo had erupted.
And what I saw was the human impact, the human
factor, of how volcanic eruptions effect livelihoods
of people.
That is something that had a profound impact
on me, that made it basically my life's mission
to keep working on improving the methods that
help us understand how volcanoes work and
to be able to better forecast how and when
eruptions occur.
We are downwind of the plume source by a few
miles, by this point, some of the gas has
converted into aerosols, and we are measuring
the product of that conversion here.
The measurements we do here are, in most cases,
timed with the overpasses of the ER-2 aircraft.
So once we are back at our computers and look
at this imaging data, we can then use our
measurements from the ground here to improve
the gas retrievals and aerosol retrievals
we do on the imagery data.
>>We're measuring with two techniques.
One is a sun photometer, and we're measuring
how the sunlight shining through the plume
is scattered by the particles.
And the other is a instrument called the FlySpec,
which measures ultraviolet radiation, and
we're seeing the absorption of the UV radiation
by the actual gas in the plume.
[Lava splashing]
We are one of several teams that are looking
at the volcano in this HyspIRI preparatory
mission.
We have another team looking at the actual
molten material.
We have another team coming in to make in-situ
measurements of the concentrations of the
gas.
And there's another team that's measuring
the impact of the volcanic gas on the vegetation
in the area.
>>Using the ground-based instrument, we have
the highest spatial resolution, and then as
we go higher up through the airborne and the
satellite sensors, the spatial resolution
is a lot poorer, and so we want to see if
we can still pick out these characteristics
on both the lava lake and the lava flows.
>>We're here to correct the data to make sure
that what we see in space is what we actually
see on the ground.
The atmosphere, it's like looking at a lens.
And we're right now characterizing that lens.
>>The great hope is that if and when the HyspIRI
mission will be flying on a satellite platform,
that we will be able to get very frequent
measurements and re-measurements of these
volcanic emissions, not only here in Hawaii,
but all around the world on all of the about
550 active volcanoes.
>>We can have a real impact on helping people
to manage this risk if we can make the measurements
and give them the information they need.
[Music]
