In the last days the world's attention has been focused on the Bali island, where the Agung volcano is showing alarming signals. Indonesia's National Disaster Management Authority (BNPB) reported, according to NASA, that the volcano first erupted on November 21. On November 27 the alert was raised to level 4 which is the highest level.
Mindful of the volcano's last major eruption in 1963 which killed about 1100 people, the authorities evacuated 100.000 people in an area of 6 miles from it. Because of the belching of grey and white plumes, the Ngurah Rai International Airport was shut down on November 27 and 28 for safety reasons, but flights resumed on the 29th.
As the lava levels at the crater of Mount Agung is starting to slow down, the attention for the volcano is still high and satellites from different countries are contributing providing a considerable amount of data.
Among them, there's e-GEOS COSMO-SkyMed constellation, which thanks to the frequent revisit of its 4 satellites and unmatched revisit time at global level, allows to map and monitor new lava outflows over the old hardened lava field using pairs collected within short time interval and interferomtetry processing (coherence) from which e-GEOS generates MTC (Multi Temporal Coherence) products.
Such products are useful in case of natural or man-made disaster (earthquake, volcano, flooding, landslides) for rapid mapping purposes. COSMO-SkyMed is the ideal instrument, due to the rapid response given by the short revisit time of the constellation and the reliability of data collection independent of scene illumination and cloud cover. Damage assessment can be carried out using archive data, both SAR and optical, over the same area.