SEVIRI Onboard Meteosat Second Generation, and the Quantitative Monitoring of Effusive Volcanoes in Europe and Africa

The spectral and radiometric performance of payload SEVIRI onboard the geostationary platform MSG-2, make its data particularly well suited not only to the detection of the onset of volcanic activity, but also to the measurement of thermal radiant fluxes and eruption rates. Thorough testing was carried out on two volcanoes - Stromboli (Aeolian Islands, Southern Italy) and Piton de la Fournaise (Reunion Island, northwestern Indian Ocean) - that mostly give rise to short-lived lava flows. Aimed to comply with the outstandingly high acquisition rate, we developed an ad-hoc code to automatically detect volcanic hot-spots, measure radiant fluxes, and derive lava volume effusion rates within the 15-minute interval between two SEVIRI data streams.