Plumetrack: Flux calculation software for UV cameras

Ultraviolet (UV) cameras are increasingly employed to map and measure SO2 abundances in volcanic emissions to the atmosphere. The main purpose of this is to estimate mass fluxes of SO2, which requires estimation of the transport velocity of the plume. In this paper, we present Plumetrack, open-source Python based software for computing SO2 fluxes from calibrated UV camera images. Designed to be the final component in UV camera processing toolchains, Plumetrack provides functionality for velocity estimation using optical-flow, flux calculation and error estimates. It can be used interactively via a graphical user interface or for batch processing via a commandline interface. We discuss the features and implementation details of Plumetrack, describe in detail a new flux calculation algorithm and demonstrate its performance on a set of synthetic UV camera images. The new algorithm is found to out perform the established flux calculation method, especially for highly spatiotemporally variable plumes. Furthermore, we show that the Plumetrack software may be successfully used with data from other imaging systems such as standard video cameras.