FireHub

The Diachronic Burnt Scar Mapping service was initially developed as a fully automatic but off-line multi-sensor processing chain that takes as input satellite images of any available spatial and spectral resolution and produces precise diachronic burnt area and damage assessment products over the Greek territory. Actually based on the underlying BSM-NOA core processing, a multi-temporal analysis has been running for estimating and mapping the annual burnt areas and the corresponding damages for a period spanning the last 35 years. It has been based on using archived USGS Landsat TM, SPOT XS, IKONOS, FORMOSAT and recently Sentinel-2/3 imagery over the entire Greece. The Burnt Scar Mapping service is further enhanced so, depending on the acquired satellite imagery. Similar to the fire detection service, the BSM one is offered online and is publicly open, and covers the wider Mediterranean, the North Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East territories. It is ingesting real time data acquired by the BEYOND/NOA Ground Segment and the Sentinel Collaborative Ground Segment, the so-called Hellenic National Sentinel Data Mirror Site, providing near real time access to Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-3 data. The underlying algorithm for automated Burnt Scar mapping is based on a custom implementation of the core BSM_NOA algorithm (Kontoes C.C. et al, 2009) combined with the Liu et al, 2014 methodology based on the use of Level Set Methods. Further modifications and optimizations were applied in order to produce accurate assessments and minimize the omission and commission error rates, as well as to adapt the proposed algorithms to the heterogeneous context of satellite systems used and their specificities in regard to data analysis.

BEYOND Center for Earth Observation Research and Satellite Remote Sensing operates the Forest Fire Information System. Our Center is responsible for providing a range of rapid satellite based active fire detection and burned area assessments products covering the entire region of Europe, Balkans, North Africa, the Black Sea and the Middle East around the clock: on a 24 hour basis, 7 days a week and 365 days a year.

The Center processes satellite data gathered by the acquisition station operate in BEYOND's facility at Penteli, as well as the Hellenic Mirror Site. Through the offered capability for processing in Real Time of SUOMI-NPP, NOAA-20, MODIS, and S-2 data, reliable and updated information on forest fires is provided on a daily basis, assisting the fire services and crisis management centers of EU and the neighboring regions. This information includes critical maps, data on the location and scale of individual fire outbreaks, as well as descriptions of the magnitude of the hazards. The service is also providing useful statistics on the affected areas in terms of Land Use/Land Cover types per fire event, country, year, etc.

The diachronically collected information as above is organised in well structured and dedicated data cubes for further exploitation and study of the fire behavior and proneness for fire ignition in the entire Mediterranean ecosystem.