FIREBIRD - small satellite for wild fire assessment

Abstract

FireBIRD is a satellite constellation consisting of two small satellites, TET-1 and BIROS, specifically designed for high temperature events (HTE) and high temperature anomaly detection. This satellite mission of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), which is based on the heritage of the BIRD satellite, aims at the detection and characterizing wild fires using a thermal camera system with one band in the midwave (MWIR) and one band in the longwave-infrared (LWIR). In combination with a red band from the visible spectra, the bi-spectral method [1] is adapted for fire detection and analysis. Besides the clusters of active fires itself, additionally information about fire radiative power, temperature and fire area is derived and can be used for the assessment of active fires. With a pixel spacing of ~170m the spatial resolution is rather high compared to MODIS or Sentinel-3. Additionally, the high agility of the satellites allows image acquisitions on several consecutive days, useful to monitor the development of active fires. Thus, FireBIRD can be used for characterizing fires, hot spot mapping in case of catastrophic events as well as for environmental analysis and inter-comparisons with other sensors. The adapted algorithm provides stable and reliable results, ongoing improvements focuses on a better assessment of background temperatures and in addition, single pixel information are derived for validation assessment tasks.