Volcanologists Use SKATE to Capture Eruptions in Stunning Detail

When hundreds of volcanologists gathered in Geneva last July for the world’s largest volcanology conference, Italy’s Instituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV) drew particular attention. INGV was presenting results from five years of very close range observations of Stromboli, one of the Mediterranean’s most monitored volcanoes. Its frequent small eruptions make it both a natural laboratory for vulcanologists and a constant safety concern for the island’s roughly 500 residents and thousands of tourists.

The last three years of close observations were made possible by a portable observatory called the Setup for the Kinematic Acquisition of Explosive Eruptions, or SKATE. The suitcase-sized system is packed with tech that captures eruptions at hundreds of frames per second, synchronously recording their roar and their heat.

Filming and analyzing an explosive eruption up close for hours, while capturing data about its heat, sound, and motion, has historically been tricky and dangerous. But that’s the data scientists need to understand how eruptions work and evolve over time. SKATE makes that process both safer and simpler by autonomously recording synchronized streams of observatory data and minimizing the time researchers need to spend on a volcano’s slopes.

“Explosive eruptions are extremely fast processes with particles the size of a truck or a grain of dust that can travel from a few meters per second to supersonic speeds,” says Jacopo Taddeucci, a senior researcher at INGV. “You need cameras shooting hundreds of frames per second and instruments that can see, hear, and feel the eruption at once to understand cause and effect.”

Aside from Stromboli, SKATE has been tested on the nearby Mount Etna, as well as on Guatemala’s Fuego and Santiaguito volcanoes. Worldwide, 500 million people live near active volcanoes, many of which are ] without any monitoring system. INGV is now planning deployments on other volcanoes, including Mount Yasur in Vanuatu, known as the “Lighthouse of the Pacific” for its near continuous eruptions featuring rhythmic bursts of incandescent lava and gas.

SKATE’s Innovative Volcanology Technology

SKATE was assembled by Technology Equipment Engineering Solutions (TEES), an Italian manufacturer of custom scientific instruments and Dewesoft, a Slovenian company specializing in high-speed data acquisition and measurement systems. The two companies followed INGV’s specifications to pack an entire observatory into a rigid polypropylene shell on a €50,000 (about US $58,000) budget.

SKATE is the streamlined successor to an earlier INGV prototype known as FAMoUS (Fast Multiparametric Setup), which first proved the value of combining high-speed, thermal, and acoustic sensors. But it also came with serious drawbacks: It was heavy and bulky, took a long time to install on site, and required manual triggering, which forced researchers to spend hours in hazardous zones to capture only a handful of sequences.

SKATE is more portable and easier to deploy than its predecessor, a system called FAMoUS.Piergiorgio Scarlato and Jacopo Taddeucci

Inside SKATE, a waterproof PC coordinates a thermal camera recording at 32 frames per second, and a high-speed camera that records bursts of footage when it detects sudden temperature spikes. Continuous 4K video capture would, in fact, quickly swamp SKATE’s data storage, as a single day of 4K recording would require 100 times as much memory as SKATE has.

“The real challenge wasn’t plugging in cameras and sensors,” says Alessia Longo, an engineer at Dewesoft. “It was forcing them to write into a single, perfectly synchronized file, and taming the data flood.”

That data is stored on two SSDs with a total capacity of up to 6 terabytes, and the system operates autonomously for a full day in good weather, relying on solar panels and replaceable batteries.

“The creativity of a volcanologist lies in the ability to take technologies developed for other industries, like high-speed cameras used in sports events or military thermal imagers, and adapt them for scientific research on active volcanoes,” says Piergiorgio Scarlato, INGV’s research director.

Modular Design Enhances Volcanic Monitoring

Placed between 300 and 900 meters from Stromboli’s active vents, SKATE runs almost entirely on its own. Researchers only hike up once a day to swap batteries and memory cards.

The design is also modular. Alongside the thermal, high-speed, and acoustic sensors, INGV is now testing SKATE with a UV camera to quantify sulfur dioxide emissions. It’s also testing a laser rangefinder that provides distances to volcano’s plume or crater rim, or moving slopes ten times per second. It can also provide analysis of individual lava bombs and rock fragments ejected during eruptions, allowing for precise reconstructions of their trajectories and landing areas.

“Depth is what turns a spectacular image into a measurement,” says Scarlato “By understanding how volcanic projectiles are launched, how far they travel, and where they fall, we can better assess the impact of eruptions on people, infrastructure, and the surrounding environment.”

On Stromboli, the INGV team has analyzed more than a thousand explosions recorded between 2019 and 2024, matching high-speed videos, temperatures, and sound. Each vent, they discovered, develops its own personality: gas-rich jets sound softer and linger longer, while volcanic bombs—chunks of lava flung out during an eruption—and ash-rich blasts roar briefly and hurl incandescent fragments higher into the air.

SKATE’s Role in Volcanic Data Analysis

SKATE isn’t a 24/7 alarm. It’s too complex and data-hungry to stream from a crater rim in real time. Instead, it helps fixed monitoring networks located farther from the crater—such as thermal cameras, infrasound arrays, and other instruments—to make better sense of their signals.

A researcher uses SKATE to monitor a volcano.Piergiorgio Scarlato and Jacopo Taddeucci

Data from SKATE is helping scientists test hypotheses about how gas bubbles rise and burst inside magma, how volcanic conduits are shaped, and study subsurface processes that ordinary monitoring can’t see. INGV aims to turn some recurring patterns into reference libraries that could train automated systems to recognize early warning signs in live data streams.

SKATE’s success is changing how volcanologists monitor active volcanoes for warning signs. But volcanoes will never be truly predictable or safe environments. Humidity often corrodes cables and steams camera lenses. During one recent deployment, a goat ate the microphone cable. And in a recent on Stromboli, INGV experimented with a new black and white high-speed sensor, ideal for tracking glowing bombs at night proved trickier than expected, as Stromboli’s bursts last only a few seconds and make it difficult for the sensor to focus on them.

Despite the hurdles, the rapid, detailed data SKATE provides is welcome. “Working in such extreme conditions, with humidity, gases, and sudden temperature changes, is the real test for any technology,” says Scarlato. “The difference now is that our interventions last minutes, not hours.”