A robust multitemporal satellite technique for volcanic activity monitoring: Possible impacts on volcanic hazard mitigation

Among the natural hazards, volcanoes represent one of major risk for both population and surrounding infrastructures, causing every year significant economical and environmental damages. Satellite remote sensing, thanks to multispectral data, high observational frequencies and global coverage, represents an important tool for volcanic activity monitoring, especially in remote areas where traditional techniques are generally inadequately applied. A new multitemporal satellite approach named RST (Robust Satellite Techniques) applied to several recent eruptions of Mount Etna and Stromboli volcanoes has shown to be suitable to correctly identifying and tracking volcanic ash plumes as well as to successfully detecting and monitoring volcanic thermal anomalies strongly reducing false alarm occurrences. In this paper, some recent RST results, confirming the high reliability and sensitivity of the proposed approach in volcanic activity monitoring together with its full exportability on different satellite platforms and geographic locations will be shown and discussed.