Airborne FTIR Measurements over the Mt. Etna Volcano Preliminary Results from the 2003 FASA Campaign

From 16 to 26 July 2003 an extensive field campaign was carried out around Mt Etna, Sicily, Italy. During the campaign a new airborne system, Fire Airborne Spectral Analyzer (FASA), was tested. The main instrument of the payload is a high resolution Michelson Interferometer with Rotating Retroreflector (MIROR), which operates in the nominal infrared 600–3000 cm21 spectral range with a high resolution of 0.12 cm21. This work investigates the feasibility of usingMIROR data to retrieve the surface temperature, the hyper-spectral emissivity and the SO2 volcanic plume abundance. The results for the surface parameters show a good agreement with those obtained by satellite data and on ground measurements. In particular, the spectral emissivity shows a meaningful minimum, around 1040 cm21, consistent with the basaltic properties of Mt Etna’s surface. A sensitivity study has also been carried out to show the difficulties of SO2 columnar abundance retrieval due to the too low SO2 volcanicemission and the too high instrumental noise.