The AVTOD (ASTER Volcanic Thermal Output Database) Latin America archive
By K. Reath, CSI member Matt Pritchard and colleagues
Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research, Vol. 376, 1 April 2019
Thermal spaceborne remote sensing has been used to study, monitor, and forecast volcanic activity for decades. But these data have not been used systematically at high spatial resolution to study changes in volcano temperatures across an entire region spanning multiple decades to understand background thermal activity and its relation to unrest and eruption. We have developed a first-of-a-kind database that uses manual analysis to identify and collect data for volcanic thermal output with 90 m/pixel spatial resolution for 330 potentially active volcanoes found in Latin America between the years 2000 – 2017. This database is reliant on the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) sensor due to its high spatial resolution data, capability of detecting low-level thermal features, its accessibility and reliability compared to similar data types, and the long time series available at multiple volcanoes.
