Wildfire Detection and Tracking over Greece Using MSG‑SEVIRI Satellite Data

Abstract

Abstract:Greece is a high risk Mediterranean country with respect to wildfires. This risk has been increasing under the impact of climate change, and in summer 2007 approximately 200,000 ha of vegetated land were burnt. The SEVIRI sensor, on board the Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) geostationary satellite, is the only spaceborne sensor providing five and 15-minute observations of Europe in 12 spectral channels, including a short-wave infrared band sensitive to fire radiative temperature. In August 2007, when the bulk of the destructive wildfires started in Greece, the receiving station, operated by the Institute for Space Applications and Remote Sensing, provided us with a time series of MSG-SEVIRI images. These images were processed in order to test the reliability of a real-time detection and tracking system and its complementarity to conventional means provided by the Fire Brigade. EUMETSAT's Active Fire Monitoring (FIR) image processing algorithm for fire detection and monitoring was applied to SEVIRI data, then fine-tuned according to Greek conditions, and evaluated. Alarm announcements from the Fire Brigade's archives were used as ground truthing data in order to assess detection reliability and system performance. During the examined period, MSG-SEVIRI data successfully detected 82% of the fire events in Greek territory with less than 1% false alarms.

Operational wildfire monitoring and disaster management support using state-of-the-art EO and Information Technologies

“…• The application SEVIRI Monitor manages the data stream in real-time by offering the following functionalities: a) Extract and store the raw file metadata in an SQLite database, b) Filter the raw data files and dispatch them to a dedicated disk array for permanent storage, c) Remotely trigger the processing chain [4] to derive hotspots, and d) dispatch these hotspot products to the disk array and additionally store them to a PostGIS database. • Dissemination to the end user community (civil protection agencies, regional authorities) through a web application.…”

Design Issues of an Operational Fire Detection System Integrated with Observation Sensors

“…Moreover new fire detection algorithms need to be explored and validated accounting for the local specificities, morphological features and land use/land cover conditions of the area they apply. To this end NOA/ISARS has proposed improvements in the algorithmic approaches proposed by EUMETSAT for fire detection using Meteosat Second Generation satellites, and introduced appropriate adaptations over Greece to avoid fire model detection uncertainties and reduce the returned false fire alarms, see (Sifakis et al, 2009). At this point, it is briefly mentioned that our proposed model could further be extended and integrated with the web based European Forest Fire Information System consisting of two operational sub-modules: The European Forest Fire Risk Forecasting System (EFFRFS) which is a module for fire risk forecasting information and processing and the European Forest Fire Damage Assessment System (EFFDAS), which is capable of evaluating and assess the damage caused after a fire event using satellite imagery.…”

An intercomparison of burnt area estimates derived from key operational products: the Greek wildland fires of 2005–2007

“…At the same time, it extends in both the temporal and spatial domains as well as in depth of analysis conducted in an analogous intercomparison study conducted earlier by Boschetti et al (2008). Last but not least, it facilitates a complementary work to existing approaches concerning the evaluation of mapping the burnt areas at the national level, a topic of sustained interest even today (Kontoes et al, 2009;Veraverbeke et al, 2010;Sifakis et al, 2011;Petropoulos et al, 2012).…”

“…In addition, the climate change, along with the effects of various anthropogenic activities, further increase the risk of fire occurrence and thus the damage caused to both nature and economy (Boboulos and Purvis, 2009). The wildland fire occurrence in those areas has a major impact on the economy of affected countries, influencing also the broader European Community through the destruction incurred in marketable assets (Sifakis et al, 2011). This is why being able to acquire information on past fire events and map the burning from wildfire has been underlined as a matter of key importance to both environmental scientists and policy makers (Rong et al, 2004;Kasischke et al, 1995;Giglio et al, 2006).…”