- forest fires control and preventing;
- reducing costs on forest management (including routes of air patrol);
- juxtaposition of data acquired from ground, aerial, space receivers with data from emergency and fire services;
- integration of all data in one geoinformation system.
There are many factors that influence wildfire's spread: weather conditions, moisture content, trees density, soil type, relief. Basing on these factors wildfires are classified into the ground, crawling (surface), ladder, crown (aerial) fires. Regardless of the wildfire type, satellite imagery can be successfully applied for purposes of fire detection and prevention. As a rule, specialists use satellite images of low spatial resolution (less than 1 km) but with good update frequency (1-3 hours). For instance, an image with 1km resolution allows us to detect centers of ignition of fires that occur 30x30 m.
In the figure below there is an example of satellite imagery application for wildfire detecting. The output data can be displayed as a satellite image with sources of ignition marked in red. All data on sources of ignition is presented in a vector layer and also has attribute information (coordinates, description, metadata, etc.).
Forest fires detection
Manual and automatic interpretation of satellite images allows creating a thematic map of forest fires and windthrows. Basing on the acquired data our specialists write reports and estimate the damage of an emergency.