Animations of images produced with data from the Advanced Baseline Instrument (ABI) showing plumes from the April 2021 La Soufrière eruption

A series of explosive eruptions began at La Soufrière, on St Vincent, on 9th April 2021, with the last event occurring on 22nd April. The eruption was observed by the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) on the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite East (GOES-East) platform. The instrument measures in 16 channels in the visible, near-infrared and infrared, across a large area which includes the Carribean. During the La Soufrière eruption, the ABI instrument made measurements for the full disc every 10-minutes, and for part of the eruption, a mesoscale region was moved over the volcano, providing data every minute. In this study, data from this satellite instrument has been used to construct four images: (a) a true colour image, (b) a false colour image (12.3 - 10.3 µm, 11.2 - 8.4 µm and 10.3 µm channels assigned to red, green and blue respectively), (c) 10.3 - 11.2 µm brightness temperature difference, and (d) 11.2 - 12.3 µm brightness temperature difference. These have been used to study the plumes produced during the April 2021 eruption, allowing the identification of at least 35 explosive events. In this repository, an animation of the created images has been provided for each of the explosive events identified. The animation names are constructed to indicate the volcano (LaSoufriere), the instrument (ABI), the type of data (i.e. full disc or meso), the event number, the start date/time (yyyymmddhhmm) and the end date/time (yyyymmddhhmm). For example: ‘LaSoufriere_ABI_full_event01_202104091250_202104091740.mp4’ Note that the start and end times indicate the start time of measurement period and some adjustment is needed to ascertain the time over the volcano for the full disc (~ +243 seconds). This has been accounted for in the title shown in each frame of the full disc animations. Also note that two animations are provided for event 5 as measurements from the mesoscale region began during this period. We are grateful to the NOAA Big Data Program through which the GOES-16 data are available. These animations accompany a paper: Taylor, I.A., Grainger, R.G., Prata, A.T., Proud, S,R, Mather, T.A., Pyle, D.M.: A satellite chronology of plumes from the April 2021 eruption of La Soufrière, St Vincent, Accepted for publication in Atmospheric, Chemistry and Physics.