UH geologists
know the
Hotspots
A UH Web site monitors
By Helen Altonn
impending eruptions and
quickly displays vital data
Star-BulletinUniversity of Hawaii researchers on the Manoa campus saw an eruption starting in September in the Galapagos Islands three hours before scientists there saw it.
They saw the Pacaya volcano in Guatemala begin heating up seven days before it erupted on May 20.
And on Friday, electronics engineer Eric Pilger in the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology saw "a burst" from the Popocatepetl volcano on the outskirts of Mexico City.
"It looks like a pop. It just spit something out again," he said.
The institute's researchers, led by volcanologist Luke Flynn, have developed a system to monitor imminent eruptive activity via satellite and put the data on the Web in 11 minutes.
That they can relay data from satellites to the mainland and then to Hawaii that quickly is "just incredible," Flynn said before leaving yesterday to present the research at an American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.
The Hawaii scientists can't tell exactly when an eruption is going to happen, but they can say "something is going to happen pretty soon," Flynn said.
Flynn's team includes researchers Pilger, Andrew Harris, Harold Garbeil and Chris Okubo.
They're monitoring volcanoes from space via two Geostationary Environmental Satellites, which can produce images every 15 minutes. The satellites have been used for two years to monitor fires and lava flows in Hawaii.
The GOES data goes to the Naval Research Laboratory in Monterey, Calif., where it is pre-processed, then sent electronically to the Manoa campus. An automated computer system at the UH picks hot spots out of the data and puts images on the Web.
Flynn said certain types of volcanoes have thick, viscous lava, and domes that are dormant or inactive for a long period.
His group thinks they're seeing small cracks in the dome starting to expand when fresh lava rises, he said. The heightened activity and heat from the domes are signs of an impending eruption, he said.
Hawaii's volcanoes "tend to have streams of lava . . . much more easily flowing," Flynn said. "So they tend not to give a warning like that."
On the other hand, he added, Hawaii's type of volcanoes "don't blow up and cause big ash clouds."
The UH scientists send information to an e-mail alert site and a UH Hotspots Web site, which allows anyone in the world with Internet access to look at the data, Flynn pointed out.
The Web site displays geographic locations and thermal intensities for eruptions and fires at 12 sites, including Big Island volcanoes Kilauea and Mauna Loa, and volcanoes in Montserrat in the West Indies, Northern Chile, Guatemala, central and western Mexico and the Galapagos Islands.
The system also has been used to monitor fires in Florida, California and Hawaii, and continually monitors parts of the Amazon rain forest where burning is occurring because of deforestation.
"We don't make a call whether an eruption is going to happen or not," he said. But if it looks like an eruption may occur, they try to provide information to other volcanologists or concerned parties, Flynn said.
The U.S. Geological Survey's Hawaii Volcano Observatory uses the Hotspots Web site to determine eruption start and stop times on Kilauea and to investigate claims of new eruptions on Mauna Loa.
The UH scientists have been looking at Hawaii data for about two years. North, Central and South American sites were added the past six months.
Flynn said Pilger, Harris and Garbeil came up with the initial Web site and did a lot of the initial processing. Okubo designed much of the graphics and constantly monitors site activity, he said.
Okubo saw the eruption starting in the Galapagos Islands, and the team notified the Darwin Research Station on a neighboring island because of danger to the fragile ecosystem.
Pilger, who helped develop the Web sites and computer programs, said he and Harris had been doing similar things with other data and thought it would be "real neat" to do it with the GOES satellites.
Even if the information is after the fact, he said, scientists can look almost immediately at what happened.
The disappointing thing with the GOES satellites is that the volcanology team can only see half of Earth -- "our local neighborhood," Pilger said.
But NASA will launch a spacecraft at the end of 1999 that will carry a system Flynn developed to look at the entire planet every 1-1/2 days.
Flynn also has developed a computer program that will sort through the data "and tell us where eruptions or forest fires are all around the world," he said.
"The University of Hawaii is the only place that's going to have this capability, because all the information comes to the UH," he said.
Visit the UH Hotspots site
