Volcanic Risk Management: the Case of Mt. Etna 2006 Eruption

Mt. Etna volcano is located in a very populated area of eastern Sicily (Italy). Its permanent degassing activity from summit craters and frequent eruptions impact significantly on town habitations and cultivated areas. In the latest years Etna has produced copious ash emission causing great losses to local economy and causing serious hazards to national and international air traffic over Mediterranean area and the often closure of Catania airport. In July 2006 eruptive vents opened on the East and South flanks of the summit craters showing irregular explosive and effusive activity lasting 6 months. This eruption represented the opportunity to perform the pre-operative test of FP6 Eurorisk-Preview (Prevention, Information and Early Warning) project aimed to develop tools for monitoring volcanoes. The test was performed during two temporal phases: the first one of early-warning was aimed to measure ground deformation and the second one during the crisis to survey volcanic ash produced during the explosions. The ground deformations were measured through the elaboration of SAR data. Beside the geophysical objectives, the test was also important to check data availability and efficiency of European Space Agency procedures. The pre-operative test has been peculiar to understand and quantify the delivering time of the final satellite products expected from the Volcanological Observatory in operative case. The analysis of July 2005 - July 2006 SAR data showed a pre-eruptive inflation trend in agreement with the ground network of GPS data. The magmatic source, that produced the September - October activity, has been located about 2.7 km below the summit craters. During the crisis phase characterized by paroxysmal activity, the Italian Civil Protection (DPC) in charge of airport closure in case of volcanic hazard, requested the satellite volcanic ash product retrieved from the NASA-MODIS data. An agreement between the industry Telespazio as direct broadcast of satellite data at Matera station and INGV was signed in order to elaborate the data in near-real time. The volcanic ash product provided information about: the presence of volcanic ash in the air; the affected area; the volcanic plume dispersal direction, dimensions and altitude and the volcanic ash loading. The satellite products and the observations report have been successively inserted in a web-interface. At the same time the observations report has been linked to the DPC dedicated Web-GIS interface that allows in a short time the availability of volcanic ash information to DPC in support to their decisions