Forecasting Volcanic Eruptions with Artificial Intelligence - Eos

Most of the roughly 1,400 active volcanoes around the world, including many in the United States, do not have on-site observatories. Lacking ground-level data, scientists are turning to satellites to keep tabs on volcanoes from space. Now using artificial intelligence, scientists have created a new satellite-based method of detecting warning signs of when a volcano is likely to erupt. Gaddes et al. took advantage of satellites that carry instruments equipped to collect imagery using interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR), which can detect centimeter-scale deformations of Earth's surface. Every time one of the satellites passes over a given volcano--typically once every 12 days--it can capture an InSAR image of the volcano from which ground movement away from or toward the satellite can be calculated.