Assessment of recent trends of wildfire activity in Europe

Abstract

DLR's Earth Observation Center (EOC) is operating a burnt area monitoring service for Europe. It is based on mid-resolution Sentinel-3 OLCI (Ocean and Land Color Instrument) satellite imagery, research of methodologies and developments of processing chains (Nolde et al. 2020) and provides burnt area information twice a day in near-real time. The service is fully automated and targeted at supporting both, rapid mapping activities and timely post fire damage assessment. It is designed incrementally, in a way that generated results are refined and optimized as soon as new satellite data becomes available. Besides the burn perimeter and detection date, the output data also contains detailed information regarding the burn severity of each detected burnt area While the service is primarily intended for continental-scale monitoring of wildfire occurrence, the accumulated results allows the analysis of multi-year development trends regarding the mentioned parameters in addition. This study, firstly, demonstrates the capabilities of the wildfire monitoring service, and secondly, analyses trends regarding fire extent, seasonality, and burn severity for the region of Europe regarding the recent years. The results are set in relation with findings derived for study areas outside Europe, namely California / USA and New South Wales / Australia. The focus of the study is put on fire severity, since this information is not present in most common, large scale burnt area datasets. Yet, fire severity is a critical aspect of fire regimes, determining fire impacts on ecosystem attributes and associated post-fire recovery. In addition to the analysis of large-scale wildfire activity, the results of the burnt area monitoring service can be utilized to monitor the spatio-temporal evolution of large lava flow events in near-real time, as for example the 2018 Lower East Rift Zone eruption at Kilauea Volcano, Hawaii or the 2021 eruption on La Palma. Reference: Nolde, M., Plank, S., & Riedlinger, T. (2020). An Adaptive and Extensible System for Satellite-Based, Large Scale Burnt Area Monitoring in Near-Real Time. Remote Sensing, 12(13), 2162.