Satellite Observations of Lava Lake Activity at Nyiragongo Volvano, Ex-Zaire, during the Rwandan Refugee Crisis

In June 1994 the summit crater of Nyiragongo volcano, located in the Great Lakes region of central Africa, began to fill with new lava, ending nearly 12 years of quiescence. An earlier eruption of the volcano in 1977 had culminated in the catastrophic draining of a lava lake through fissures in the crater wall, feeding highly mobile lava flows which reached the outskirts of Goma and killed more than 70 people. By July 1994, as many as 20,000 Hutu refugees were arriving in Goma every hour, only 18km south from the summit of Nyiragongo. The exodus brought more than one million people to the camps near the town raising fears of a repeat of the 1977 eruption. This paper examines the role that satellite remote sensing could have played in surveillance of the volcano during this time, and demonstrates the potential for monitoring this and other volcanoes in the future. Images recorded by the spaceborne Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) – freely available over the Internet – provide semi-quantitative information on the activity of the volcano. The aim of this paper is to promote the wider use of readily available technologies.