Detecting wildfires with the Korean geostationary meteorological satellite

Abstract

AbstractSatellite remote sensing is a useful tool for monitoring wildfire by analysing the brightness temperature of medium and thermal infrared bands. This letter described a wildfire detection algorithm developed for the COMS (communication, ocean and meteorological satellite) and evaluated the applicability of the proposed method by comparing the detection results with the KFS (Korea Forest Service) wildfire survey data and ASTER (advanced spaceborne thermal emission and reflection radiometer) image. We detected various size of wildfires occurred in South Korea on 9 March 2013, which is a remarkable outcome when considering the limited channels of the COMS. For a more reliable algorithm, the characterization of subpixel fires using Dozier’s method or the multiple endmember spectral mixture analysis will be necessary as future work. In addition, more wildfire cases should be experimented for statistical assessment of the accuracy. AcknowledgementsWe greatly appreciate the valuable comments from the editor and the two anonymous reviewers for helping us to improve this letter.FundingThis work was funded by the Korea Meteorological Administration Research and Development Programme under the grant CATER 2012–2069.