Kilauea Volcanic Fountain Creates Ash Clouds, Flight Cancellations
Kilauea on the big island of Hawaii is renowned for its new-continuous eruptions. However, the output of the volcano isn’t consistent, with some periods featuring slower lava flows with other times having pronounced, notable lava fountains. On 10 March 2026, the lava fountains were particularly intense. Local media reported fountain heights approaching 1500 feet (450 m) tall, measurable ashfall accumulation, and tephra (volcanic ejected material) up to three inches in diameter. The US Geological Survey notice about this event can be read here.
Just as the Band 7 (3.9) micron channel from the GOES Aadvanced Baseline Imager (ABI) is well-suited for fire detection, it is also quite useful for volcano monitoring. The following animation shows the 3.9 micron channel for the period both before and during the appearance of the fountains. The existing eruption is visible as the dark spot on the southeast side of the big island of Hawaii. However, with the fountains beginning between 1900 and 2000 UTC (9:00 to 10:00 AM local time) the bright spot gets so hot that it saturates the scale and appears as a bright white dot that is occasionally obscured by the optically thick ash plume.
Of course, ash is a real concern with an eruption like this, due to the impacts it has on human health and aviation safety. The GOES Volcanic Ash RGB helps monitor the evolution of the ash plume. The following animation is for the same period as the one above, but for this RGB product. The bright green plume is easy to see. Plumes with this color are high in SO2. Hawaiian airlines reacted to this threat by cancelling its Honolulu to Hilo flights and diverting others to Kona.
The Community Satellite Processing Package (CSPP) calculates Level 2 products from both geostationary and polar orbiting satellites. The CSPP GeoSphere site enables the display of these products. Here’s a move of the aerosol optical depth. Note that this product is only available in otherwise clear skies and during the day, so there are gaps in the retrieval when clouds are present. Still, it shows the evolution of the ash plume from this eruption before it gets overtaken by both clouds and night.
The NEXRAD radar on the south shore of the big island captured the ashfall, too. This animation depicts the evolution of the ash cloud as seen by both the standard reflectivity (left) as well as the correlation coefficient (right). That latter panel depicts a large plume of non-spherical scatterers, consistent with the irregular shape of ash and tephra.
The radar can also be used to investigate just how high the ash plume went. Here is an animation of the different elevation angles of the radar at a single time, 21:58 UTC. The elevation angle, ranging from 0.5 to 3.1 degrees, can be seen in the lower right of the image, just to the left of the time.
Finally, the GOES-18 mesoscale sector scan was deployed to Hawaii during the middle of the eruption to capture it as well as the ongoing Kona low that was bringing rain and flooding to parts of the state. This gives us some fantastic views of the plume. Here it is in both the true color and volcanic ash RGB products.
This particular event ended around 6:30 PM local time (0430 UTC on the 11th), but there may be more fountain events in the future.