Monitoring Burnt-out areas in Russia

19 August 2010, 9:32am

Fire blazes, burnt areas and smoke plumes in Sverdlovsk Region. SPOT 4 images. Acquisition date: August 17, 2010. (SpotImage, SCANEX, 2010)

A reduction in number of “hot spots” – possible fire blazes – was registered by satellites for the second day in a row. MODIS sensors of Terra and Aqua satellites have detected 188 “hot spots” on August 17, with 218 on August 16 and over 300-350 blazes detected daily over the first two weeks of the month. Current reduction in number of possible fire blazes is attributed to better fire situation as a whole, a strong storm font with showers and heavy clouds over the Central Russia preventing the detection of all actually existing “hot spots”.

Most fire-hazardous regions are now Sverdlovsk (42 spots detected on August 17), Tula (12), Nizhny Novgorod (11), Vladimir (11) Regions, Republic of Mariy El (11), with a difficult situation still remaining in Ryazan Region. Day-time images of NOAA-19 meteo satellite, received at 14:03 Moscow time, when the smog cleared away, fire blazes and smoke plumes became visible to the south-eastern of Moscow Region and to the north of Rayzan, where even strong rains failed to master the nature.

— At the same time the detected thermal spots not always pose a threat to the population and premises and do not do harm to the forest due to small areas and burning of dry underlayer, including remote areas. Such situation exists, for example, in Tula Region, - said Deputy Head of the National Center for Crisis Management Vladimir Kurochkin.

With fires being gradually put out the task of damage assessment and area recovery arises. Detailed satellite images of Landsat 5 and SPOT 4 enable to carry out analysis of the fire consequences and to assess burnt areas.

Performing operational fire monitoring and publishing daily its materials ScanEx started to supply near real-time data of Landsat 5 and SPOT 4 satellites for mapping fires within the frames of a special open project.

— We addressed to OpenStreetMap community, generating user maps under open license, with a proposal to take part in mapping the fires consequences. These data can further on be used for GIS-analysis of the economic damage and ecology in the regions, - says ScanEx Deputy General Director Alexei Kucheiko. – Resting upon successful experience of similar cooperation of OSM project with mapping companies during the information support of the Haiti rescuers activities we hope to get complete and accessible information about the 2010 summer fires consequences in the nearest future.

The burnt areas mapping project was launched on August 16 by the initiative of the specialists of the Geoinformation Technologies Department of ScanEx RDC and was declared a “project of the week” on the official blog of the OpenStreetMap community. Over 6000 sq.km of burnt areas have already been mapped. Mapping results are published in form of a daily updated layer on the portal “Fires.Kosmosnimki” in the “Boundaries\Burnt areas boundaries” department and are available for downloading.

Any one may master the methods of mapping: the instruction is available on the wiki-page of the project. More information about the burnt areas mapping project progress is available in the Kosmosnimki.Ru portal blog at the link below.

Kosmosnimki.Ru portal blog

Read the full article and access all imagery

Geo: International