Forest Fire Monitoring in Europe by ESA and NASA

30 August 2007, 11:36am

According to the Rapid Damage Assessment System developed by JRC-IES in the context of European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), the total burned areas in Greece until the 23 of August was 84 847 ha. Following the extreme fire events that have ravaged the country between 24 and 26 August, this figure highly increased up to a burned area of 183 987 ha, which brings to a total burned area for summer 2007 of 268 834 ha (provisional data).

The concentration of the fire damage in the Peloponnese coincides with the fire danger maps produced by EFFIS Fire Danger system that shows the Peloponnese as being the area of Greece with highest meteorological fire risk. However, the forecasts for the coming days show that the fire risk in Greece in general and in Peloponnese in particular will reduce.

See the Web mapping interface at:

http://effis.jrc.it/wmi/viewer.html

See other European hot spots and fires identified from space at:

http://www.esa.int/esaEO/SEMLMOLPQ5F_index_0.html

Hot spots across Southeastern Europe from 21 to 26 August have been detected with instruments aboard ESA satellites, which have been continuously surveying fires burning across the Earth’s surface for a decade.

And NASA's Earth Observatory also monitors fire events:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=17753

Smoke from fires in Greece

The URL for another image from Greece is:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/Images/greece_tmo_2007238_lrg.jpg

The image (4337 Kb) was captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite on August 26, and places where MODIS detected actively burning fires are outlined in red. A line of fires stretches along the western coast of Greece’s Peloponnesus Peninsula. To the northeast, a large fire is casting a plume of smoke over Athens. With its brownish tinge, the smoke pooled over the Gulf of Sirte could easily be mistaken for dust from the deserts of Libya. Dust storms often travel the other direction across the Mediterranean: from Africa to Greece.

News suppied by Kate Lance from the SDI News list of the GSDI Association:
sdi-europe@lists.gsdi.org

www.gsdi.org

Geo: International