Thermal measurements on cooling lava

In recent years, great effort has been dedicated to understanding the phenomena connected with volcanic activities. In particular, the behavior of flowing lava during a big eruption is of great interest in managing emergency activities. The very first parameters to be taken into account in studying the path of the lava flow are those defining the crust properties, which are highly dependent on the cooling process. In this paper, the improvement of a multisensorial measurement system already presented by the authors is proposed, which allows the estimation of the emittance value at higher resolution than the previous architecture. This feature permits the study of the heat transfer process in the boundary regions of the lava flow during crust formation. This is an important task for experts in order to predict the behavior of the lava flow, with emittance strictly correlated to the heat transfer process and, hence, to the crust formation.