Lava emplacement mapping with SAR and optical satellite data

In this paper, we exploited satellite remote sensing data, acquired by SAR and optical sensors to map the lava emplacement during the eruption of Pico do Fogo volcano, in Cape Verde. The eruption took place in November 2014, and lasted for about 2 months. The event was imaged by several satellite missions. In particular, the ESA Sentinel-1A platform operated in that area, collecting several images with its novel acquisition mode, the so-called TOPSAR. SAR images have been processed to extract changes automatically and to infer the advancement of the lava emitted from November 23, 2014 to January 2017, by using an adaptive parametric thresholding and a hierarchical split based approach. This automatic procedure allowed mapping the evolution of the lava coverage. The results obtained thanks to this method were compared to the ones derived by using the optical images collected by Landsat-8 and EO-1 optical sensors.