Supporting the detection and monitoring of volcanic clouds: A promising new application of global navigation satellite system radio occultation

We use geographically co-located RO profiles to detect the top altitude of volcanic clouds and to analyze their impact in terms of temperature change signatures.

We obtained about 1300 RO profiles co-located with two representative eruptions (Puyehue 2011, Nabro 2011) and found that an anomaly technique recently developed for detecting convective cloud tops and studying the vertical thermal structure of deep convective systems can also be applied to volcanic clouds. Analyzing the atmospheric thermal structure after the eruptions, we found clear cooling signatures induced by volcanic cloud tops in the upper troposphere for the Puyehue case.