This is an Integrated Science Data Analysis Proposal for the renewal of ASTER Science Team Membership by the PI. There are two high level objectives. The first is to implement Phase II of the ASTER Volcanic Data Acquisition and Analysis System (VDAAS) and the ASTER Volcano Archive (AVA), bringing it online to scientists and the general public. Now beginning its beta-test phase, VDAAS is the enabling technology that provides on-demand systematic scientific search and survey access to AVA, the world's largest systematic multi-spectral volcano image library. The second is to use VDAAS to take advantage of ASTER and other multi-sensor EOS data within AVA to address four key science objectives: (a) to significantly improve our ability to recognize signs of impending volcanic activity in remotely sensed data, (b) to systematically improve estimates of proximal volcanic hazards in areas near volcanoes, (c) to systematically document meso-scale/tropospheric eruption phenomena, and (d) to use these data to constrain and improve predictive models of the dispersal of eruption products.
The systematic study of the world's most frequent volcanic activity is a compelling arena for ASTER and its sisters MISR and MODIS, the importance of which extends from basic volcanology to societal risk assessments. A significant emerging challenge for all EOS instruments is how to effectively access a burgeoning data archive in a way that allows the survey and extraction of important information in a timely way. This issue is particularly acute for ASTER which has produced a multi-spectral, high spatial resolution, feature-specific targeted global data base of over 1 million data granules, and for our volcano effort which is is simultaneously observing over 1500 volcanoes worldwide with the average acquisition rate of more than 1000 volcano-associated ASTER frames/month over our mission lifetime.
To promptly and efficiently access and manage voluminous volcano data within a large ASTER image library, and to house other ancillary correlative volcanological data from MISR, MODIS, EO-1 data sets, SRTM, and related in situ data, under this program we created VDAAS and AVA as a specialty domain to provide a fast and powerful search engine to organize and provide internet access to these data and derivative products and to carry out our own research tasks.
