• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.33 no.5_1
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• pp.587-598
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• 2017

Volcanic ash is a fine particle smaller than 2 mm in diameters. It falls after the volcanic eruption and causes various damages to transportation, manufacturing industry and respiration of living things. Therefore diffusion information of volcanic ash is highly significant for preventing the damages from it. It is advantageous to utilize satellites for observing the widely diffusing volcanic ash. In this study volcanic ash diffusion information about two eruptions of Mt. Sakurajima were calculated using the geostationary satellite, Communication, Ocean and Meteorological Satellite (COMS) Meteorological Imager (MI) and polar-orbiting satellite, Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) and the Thermal InfraRed Sensor (TIRS). The direction and velocity of volcanic ash diffusion were analyzed by extracting the volcanic ash pixels from COMS-MI images and the height was retrieved by adjusting the shadow method to Landsat-8 images. In comparison between the results of this study and those of Volcanic Ash Advisories center (VAAC), the volcanic ash tend to diffuse the same direction in both case. However, the diffusion velocity was about four times slower than VAAC information. Moreover, VAAC only provide an ash height while our study produced a variety of height information with respect to ash diffusion. The reason for different results is measured location. In case of VAAC, they produced approximate ash information around volcano crater to rapid response, while we conducted an analysis of the ash diffusion whole area using ash observed images. It is important to measure ash diffusion when large-scale eruption occurs around the Korean peninsula. In this study, it can be used to produce various ash information about the ash diffusion area using different characteristics satellite images.