Evaluation of a new satellite-based method for forest fire detection

Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR)-based fire detection methods are considered in this work in order to assess their effective usefulness in the framework of civil programmes for fire risk and damage mitigation. The discussion is divided into the evaluation of the most commonly used methods and the description of a new fire detection procedure which is proposed in this paper. Commonly used detection methods are based on using absolute threshold values for decision tests. These values usually match only with very local, uniform (in space and time) situations, and are often inadequate when applied to heterogeneous, or simply different, geographical areas or seasons. A high number of false alarms, so high as to make the satellite-based product not operationally utilizable, is the main disadvantage of the fixed-threshold approach. The new fire-detection procedure proposed here makes use only of historical AVHRR data in order to automatically produce local(in space and time) threshold values, suitable for fire-event detection also in very critical situations. High fire discrimination capabilities with low false-alarm rates, simple unsupervised implementation and, above all, flexibility for automatic extension to completely different geographic areas and observation conditions, are the main advantages associated with this new technique. Results obtained for different Italian areas have been successfully compared with ground observations made by the Italian Forestry Service. Tests made over a long observation period show that, on cloud-free regions, more than 75% of significant forest fires are detected with less than 20% of false alarms.