2024 Volume 44 Issue 1 Pages 9-20
The National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience (NIED) has been developing and operating airborne optical sensors for volcano observation since the 1980s. Four such devices have been developed. The first three instruments, developed between 1990 and 2015, were spectral imaging scanners mounted on special fixed-wing aircraft to observe the nadir. These sensors allowed the acquisition of temperature distributions, gas concentration distributions, spectral information, and the topography of the volcano. A fourth instrument was developed in 2020. This portable device does not require a dedicated aircraft, and allows oblique observation of volcanoes from the air outside the area covered by the eruption alert level. We present an overview of these devices and their performance in this paper.
