Wildfire Detection and Tracking over Greece Using MSG-SEVIRI Satellite Data

Greece is a high risk Mediterranean country with respect to wildfires. This risk has been increasing under the impact of climate change, and in summer 2007 approximately 200,000 ha of vegetated land were burnt. The SEVIRI sensor, on board the Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) geostationary satellite, is the only spaceborne sensor providing five and 15-minute observations of Europe in 12 spectral channels, including a short-wave infrared band sensitive to fire radiative temperature. In August 2007, when the bulk of the destructive wildfires started in Greece, the receiving station, operated by the Institute for Space Applications and Remote Sensing, provided us with a time series of MSG-SEVIRI images. These images were processed in order to test the reliability of a real-time detection and tracking system and its complementarity to conventional means provided by the Fire Brigade. EUMETSAT’s Active Fire Monitoring (FIR) image processing algorithm for fire detection and monitoring was applied to SEVIRI data, then fine-tuned according to Greek conditions, and evaluated. Alarm announcements from the Fire Brigade’s archives were used as ground truthing data in order to assess detection reliability and system performance. During the examined period, MSG-SEVIRI data successfully detected 82% of the fire events in Greek territory with less than 1% false alarms.