Estimating the altitude of volcanic sulfur dioxide plumes from space borne hyper-spectral UV measurements

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

5-28-2009

Abstract

[1] The altitude of volcanic sulfur dioxide (SO2) plumes determines the transport and atmospheric residence time 01 derived sulfate aerosol, and hence their impacts on the environment and climate. Knowledge of the altitude of fresh eruption clouds is also very important in aviation safety to avoid flying through ash clouds and for forecasting of plume drift. In this paper, we demonstrate the altitude dependence of the spectral response in the backscattered ultraviolet (BUV) radiance when a SO2 absorption layer is added to an ozone-laden atmosphere. The distinctive spectral response serves as the physical basis for simultaneous SO2 loading and altitude retrievals, which can improve the characterization of volcanic emissions. We accomplish this by extending the recently developed Iterative Spectral Fitting (ISF) algorithm to include effective plume altitude determination when performing simultaneous ozone and SO2 retrievals. The extended ISF algorithm is applied to hyper-spectral Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) measurements of two volcanic eruptions: Sierra Negra in October 2005 and Jebel al Tair in September 2007. The results show for the first time that a wide range of SO2 plume altitudes can be estimated directly from hyper-spectral BUV radiance measurement Copyright 2009 by the American Geophysical Union.

Publication Title

Geophysical Research Letters

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