Ιn the summer of 2017 and during the fire-fighting period (1/5/2017 - 31/10/2017), the EO Centre of Excellence BEYOND for the monitoring of Natural Disasters which is hosted by the Institute for Astronomy, Astrophysics, Space Applications and Remote Sensing (IAASARS) of the National Observatory of Athens (NOA), continued to play its societal role by deriving, supporting and distributing on a daily basis maps depicting the extent and the level of physical damages caused from every fire incident occurring over Greece.
The rapid mapping service of burned areas is based on satellite images of medium resolution which are collected on a 24/7 basis at the satellite stations owned and operated by the Centre (e.g. MODIS, NPP-VIIRS, NOAA/AVHRR, FY), as well as based on high-resolution Sentinel II data. The latter are being collected in near real time at the Hellenic National Sentinel Data Mirror Site, under the collaboration agreement signed between NOA and the European Space Agency (ESA).
This information was delivered in real-time to the Fire Brigades Authority of Greece, and also the Local Authorities, that undertake the challenging task to immediately react and address the crisis as well as the landscape recovery after the disaster for compensation and mitigation purposes. In total, the FireHub Real-Time fire-detection system has detected 157 forest fires, with an extent ranging from 6 to 29,530 acres of forest land. The most important events took place in Kithira Island, in the Prefectures of Attica and Peloponnese.