Towards Drone-based Mapping of Volcanic Gases using Gas Tomography
Enables accurate drone-based mapping of volcanic gases for volcanologists, overcoming a key aerodynamic limitation.
Drone-based in-situ gas sensors fail to detect CO2 emissions due to rotor downwash, but open-path remote sensing combined with a model-based gas tomographic reconstruction approach successfully maps volcanic gas distributions, validated against manual measurements.
Volcanoes emit large amounts of CO2, directly influencing human lives. Mapping volcanic gas emissions helps to forecast eruptions and understand the impact of volcanoes on climate and the environment. Drone-based gas sensing significantly reduces risks in volcanic monitoring but faces technical limitations when measuring gas, as rotor downwash disperses the gas plume before detection. Gas Tomography using remote gas sensing addresses this challenge. At the Salinelle dei Cappuccini mud volcanoes, we demonstrate that while drone-mounted in-situ sensors failed to detect CO2 emissions due to aerodynamic disturbance, open-path sensing successfully enabled remote gas distribution mapping. We present a novel model-based gas tomographic reconstruction approach that incorporates a Lagrangian model to compensate for wind-induced advection. The resulting gas distribution maps align with manually collected in-situ measurements, confirming that model-based gas tomography effectively overcomes downwash limitations and enables accurate mapping of volcanic emissions.