Abstract. Recent advances in uncooled detector technology now offer the possibility of using relatively inexpensive thermal (7 to 14 μm) imaging devices as tools for studying and quantifying the behaviour of hazardous gases and particulates in atmospheric plumes. An experimental fast-sampling (60 Hz) ground-based uncooled thermal imager (Cyclops), operating with four spectral channels at central wavelengths of 8.6, 10, 11 and 12 μm and one broadband channel (7–14 μm) has been tested at several volcanoes and at an industrial site, where SO₂ was a major constituent of the plumes. This paper presents new algorithms, which include atmospheric corrections to the data and better calibrations to show that SO₂ slant column density can be reliably detected and quantified. Our results indicate that it is relatively easy to identify and discriminate SO₂ in plumes, but more challenging to quantify the column densities. A full description of the retrieval algorithms, illustrative results and a detailed error analysis are provided. The noise-equivalent temperature difference (NEΔT) of the spectral channels, a fundamental measure of the quality of the measurements, lies between 0.4 and 0.8 K, resulting in slant column density errors of 20%. Frame averaging and improved NEΔT's can reduce this error to less than 10%, making a stand-off, day or night operation of an instrument of this type very practical for both monitoring industrial SO₂ emissions and for SO₂ column densities and emission measurements at active volcanoes. The imaging camera system may also be used to study thermal radiation from meteorological clouds and the atmosphere.