|
During the past few years, the European Space Agency has launched several projects related to forest fires from global to
local scales. The ATSR World Fire Atlas (WFA) project started in late 1995 and is still running today. It provides the
longest time series ever produced on the global distribution of active fires. The WFA consists of 12 years of coherent and
consistent data sets. The night time fire occurrences are derived from the 3.7 micron channel on-board the ATSR
instrument series hosted by the ERS-2 and ENVISAT satellites. The ATSR WFA products were validated first in 1998
with the support of IGBP and more recently by extensive comparisons with existing data sets on forest fires events. A
smooth transition from the ERS-2 ATSR-2 to the ENVISAT AATSR has been performed in January 2003 and the
quality of the WFA products continuity verified. The ATSR WFA products are available in near real time since May
2006. The distribution of the ATSR WFA products will be thoroughly analyzed in this paper and a synthesis of the work
performed by more than 900 registered users will be presented. The GlobCarbon project started in early 2003 with the
objective to develop a service for the production of multi-year / multi-sensors global level 3 Land products to be used as
input to carbon assimilation models. Understanding the spatial and temporal variation in carbon fluxes is essential to
constrain models that predict climate change. However our current knowledge of these spatial and temporal patterns is
uncertain, particularly over land. One of the bio-geophysical parameters that the GlobCarbon project aims to measure is
the fully calibrated estimate of the burned areas quasi-independent of the original satellite sensor. These burned areas
estimates are used in dynamic global vegetation models, a central component of the IGBP-IHDP-WCRP Global Carbon
Cycle Joint Project. The service will feature global estimates of burned areas amongst other variables from 1998 to 2007,
derived from Earth Observation sensors (ERS-2 ATSR-2, ENVISAT AATSR and SPOT VEGETATION). Finally the
RISK-EOS project started in 2003 under the framework of the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security
(GMES) initiative, with the objective to establish a network of European service providers for the provision of geoinformation
services in support to the risk management of meteorological hazards (floods and fires). The Fire component
of RISK-EOS feature two main services: the Burn Scar Mapping (BSM) service that provides some seasonal mapping of
forests and semi-natural burned areas at high spatial resolution (minimum mapping unit of 3 to 5 ha); and the Regional
Fire Monitoring (RFM) service that provides near real time observation of active fires, based on middle resolution
satellite data (AQUA/TERRA MODIS and MSG SEVIRI). The RISK-EOS BSM service builds on the achievements of
ITALSCAR, a demonstration project for the yearly mapping of burned areas in Italy, using the LANDSAT Thematic
Mapper sensor. The paper will provide a synthesis of the RISK-EOS products validation and utility reports collected
during the 2006 summer season.
|
