TROPOMI enables high resolution SO₂ flux observations from Mt. Etna, Italy, and beyond

The newly launched imaging spectrometer TROPOMI onboard the Sentinel-5 Precursor satellite provides atmospheric column measurements of sulfur dioxide (SO₂) and other gases with a pixel resolution of 3.5 × 7 km². This permits mapping emission plumes from a vast number of natural and anthropogenic emitters with unprecedented sensitivity, revealing sources which were previously undetectable from space. Novel analysis using back-trajectory modelling of satellite-based SO₂ columns allows calculation of SO₂ flux time series, which would be of great utility and scientific interest if applied globally. Volcanic SO₂ emission time series reflect magma dynamics and are used for risk assessment and calculation of the global volcanic CO₂ gas flux. TROPOMI data make this flux time series reconstruction approach possible with unprecedented spatiotemporal resolution, but these new data must be tested and validated against ground-based observations. Mt. Etna (Italy) emits SO₂ with fluxes ranging typically between 500 and 5000 t/day, measured automatically by the largest network of scanning UV spectrometers in the world, providing the ideal test-bed for this validation. A comparison of three SO₂ flux datasets, TROPOMI (one month), ground-network (one month), and ground-traverse (two days) shows acceptable to excellent agreement for most days. The result demonstrates that reliable, nearly real-time, high temporal resolution SO₂ flux time series from TROPOMI measurements are possible for Etna and, by extension, other volcanic and anthropogenic sources globally. This suggests that global automated real-time measurements of large numbers of degassing volcanoes world-wide are now possible, revolutionizing the quantity and quality of magmatic degassing data available and insights into volcanic processes to the volcanological community.