News

Two new resources for estimating wind speed and direction have recently been made available to the NOVAC community. Wind information is essential for converting measured sulfur dioxide burdens to volcanic emission rates.

For real-time emission rate estimates, wind forecast data from the NOAA Global Forecast System (GFS) are uploaded to the ‘Wind’ directory on the NOVAC sftp server. Files in this directory contain forecast conditions for the next 7 days. These data can be loaded automatically by the NOVAC Program such that the calculation of real-time sulfur dioxide emission rates is based on these wind forecasts.

In addition, historical (2005-2021) wind information from the ECMWF ERA5 model are now available in the ‘ecmwf’ directory on the NOVAC sftp server. These data provide a higher temporal and spatial resolution than data from the GFS, and are thus ideal for re-analyses of sulfur dioxide emission rates.

For more information on the use of these resources, please contact the NOVAC software working group.

In February, version 3.2 of the NOVAC Program software was released and members of the NOVAC community was informed through email on its availability. Version 3.3 is also now available. There are couple of key changes that users should be aware of when transitioning to versions 3.2 or 3.3 from 3.1 and below:

• Data uploads to Chalmers servers are transitioning to use the SFTP protocol. This requires a separate account for each observatory. Observatories that are uploading data should have been contacted with their account information.
• The latest versions of NOVAC Program require additional DLLs that support SFTP (libcrypto-1_1, libcurl, and libssl). They are in the zip file of the distribution package and need to be in the same folder as the executable for the software to work.

Download Version 3.3

Download Version 3.2

When upgrading software, always back up your configuration.xml and the executable in case you need to revert to the previous version.

Version 3.2 Change Notes

Bug fixes

• Fix issue with columns from same scan initially plotting at same time in history (#99)
• Fix issue with software crashing on re-evaluation when solar spectrum file is used (#103)
• Fix peak intensity/specsaturation (#108)
• Fix issue with SO2 blue reference line being flat during re-evaluation

New features

• Support for user-configurable spectrometer (#6)
• SFTP support for uploading pak files to offsite server (#58)
• Hostname support for FTP to instrument computer (#81)
• Addition of flux history tab (#107)
• AveSpec spectrometer support
• Axiomtec instrument computer support
• Add new “IntegrationMethod” property to STD file (#126)
• Streamlined logging for FTP upload

Version 3.3 Change Notes

Bug fixes

• Fix quirks when deleting scanners (#140)
• Fix evaluation progress bar not working in Re-Evaluation dialog (#132)
• Return parsing error if no ws, wd, or ph read from wind file in post flux dialog (#147)

New features

• Directory polling option (#111)
• Merge Evaluation Log feature (#136)
• Upload evaluation logs to FTP/SFTP server (#137)
• Use passive FTP when connecting to instrument PC

On June 16, 2021, the U.S. Geological Survey established a new monitoring site on the east side of the iconic Mount St. Helens volcano in Washington, USA. The volcano is currently quiet with no sulfur dioxide being emitted, but the scanner will provide situational awareness if and when the volcano becomes restless in the future.

We are pleased to present a detailed database of SO2 emission rates, plume locations, and meteorological conditions, derived from measurements conducted during the period 2005-2016 at 32 volcanoes in NOVAC. The database is hosted at https://novac.chalmers.se/.

Data presented in this database indicates the magnitude and natural variability of degassing observed at a daily temporal scale.

These data are freely accessible but we expect that proper credit is given to volcano observatories in case of scientific use, as indicated in our Data Use Agreement https://novac.chalmers.se/datauseagreement.

An article describing and analyzing these data was published by the collaboration: Arellano et al. (2021), https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/13/1167/2021/essd-13-1167-2021.html

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• Option to read and analyze spectra files from a directory (#137)
• Improved method to determine whether spectrum is dark (#146)
• Fix traverse display in postflux dialog when passing midnight UTC (#148)
• Add GPS status, course, and speed to STD files (#151)
• Fix rounding issue in integration time adjustments (#155)

To better assist the NOVAC community in times when in-person instruction is not possible, we are launching a video library containing short videos that discuss common issues related to the NOVAC instrumentation and software. The video library can be accessed by clicking the Tutorials tab on the NOVAC website, or by navigating directly to https://novac-community.org/tutorials. We hope to add more content to this library as we are able. If you have any questions about the existing content or would like to request a video on a specific topic that you are interested in, please send an email to one of the NOVAC working-group coordinators or the steering committee.

We welcome GNS Science from New Zealand to NOVAC. Through a project lead by Jonathan Hanson and Agnes Mazot, several NOVAC instruments will be installed in New Zealand volcanoes in the near future. Training and tests were done in March, with participation of several technical experts from GNS Science, and support from Cindy Werner (USGS-VDAP/US) and Santiago Arellano.