Webcast

35 Minutes

Lourdes Bugalho

Renata Libonati

Fire Risks and Burnt Areas

Published: 19 November 2012

First part:
Forest fires are one of the most devastating natural disasters that often occur in mainland Portugal during the summer, with an impact on the economy, environment and climate. The Institute of Meteorology, currently Portuguese Institute of the Sea and the Atmosphere (IPMA, Instituto Português do Mar e da Atmosfera) has long made efforts to provide daily information on the risk of forest fires. Currently, IPMA daily runs an index of forest fire risk based on FWI (Fire Weather Index), developed by the Canadian Forest Service. This new index, ICRIF (Indice Combinado de Risco de Incêndios Florestais ) combines FWI with the type and condition of vegetation, called structural risk, being the vegetation type based on CORINE 2000 (CLC2000) and the vegetation conditions based on daily observation of NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index), retrieved from the AVHRR radiometer. Second part:
Brazilian Amazonia together with the adjacent savanna (Cerrado) presents a huge number of fire events every year. In such context, accurate information about location and extent of burned area is required and of particular interest for the scientific communities dealing with meteorological and climate models in what concerns reliable estimations of biomass burned. Accordingly, an effort has been made by the scientific community to develop thematic products of burnt areas. In such context, this presentation will provide an overview of INPE/Brazil currently efforts in monitoring burned areas. The initiative is based on the (V,W) burned index. The index uses daily reflectance obtained from the 1km MODIS Level 1B calibrated radiance from bands 2 (NIR) and 20 (MIR). An overview will be given of results obtained and operational applications will be shown.