VISTA
Volcanic monItoring using SenTinel sensors by an integrated Approach

VISTA aims at developing a novel ensemble of algorithms to completely characterize the effects of volcanic emissions on land and atmosphere. Currently, the possibilities offered by the COPERNICUS Sentinel missions are only partially explored to provide new consistent and statistically reliable information about volcanic cloud quantification and dispersion in the atmosphere and ash deposits on the ground. Such information is crucial for aviation safety and civil protection purposes.
The project aims to develop specific methodologies integrating inverse modeling techniques (based on radiative transfer models) with dedicated machine learning approaches to formulate a set of novel integrated methods. The latter will be able to produce information that will be released in different novel products. The outcomes of the scientific investigation will be the base for the developing of a new set of services that provide the monitoring of eruption activities in both spatial and physical senses.
In the framework of volcanic surveillance service, the end goal of VISTA is to contribute to the eruption activity monitoring in a wider sense, providing reliable, consistent and homogeneous data by new services, that will be easily scalable at global scale. These services will provide information about geographic distribution and physical characteristics of phenomena that can support:
evaluation of the ash/ice/water vapour/SO2 clouds distributions to prohibit air traffic avoiding false alarms and misdetections;
evaluation of the concentration of ash/ice/ water vapour/SO2 emitted and ash deposit on ground to prevent hazards to society, including health impact;
provide information to better evaluate the effects of volcanic eruption to weather and climate.
All the study procedures will be developed ensuring a high level of scalability to establish an end-to-end service that can easily be implemented on cloud infrastructures like the COPERNICUS DIAS. The developed prototypal services will be addressed to Civil protection, VAAC and COPERNICUS and in the last project phase one or more of the services will be made available for evaluation by these stakeholders. During the VISTA project an assessment of the use of COPERNICUS Sentinels data for such goals will be made, taking advantage of the state of the art methodology developed by the INGV Earth Observation Group, ML processing capabilities available at GEO-K and of the wide experience in dealing with both satellite and in-situ data for volcanic monitoring available from AIRES Tech ltd. Further commercial exploitation and industry involvement will be explored during, and importantly, after the project completion by the SMEs involved.