Aug.
27, 2007
EUROPEAN HOT SPOTS AND FIRES IDENTIFIED FROM SPACE
Hot
spots across Southeastern Europe
from 21
to 26 August have been detected with instruments aboard ESA satellites,
which
have been continuously surveying fires burning across the
Earth’s surface for a
decade.
Working like thermometers in the
sky, the Along Track
Scanning Radiometer (ATSR) on ESA’s ERS-2 satellite and the
Advanced Along
Track Scanning Radiometer (AATSR) on ESA’s Envisat satellite
measure thermal
infrared radiation to take the temperature of Earth's land surfaces.
Temperatures exceeding 312ºK (38.85ºC) are
classed as burning fires by
AATSR, which is capable of detecting fires as small as gas flares from
industrial sites because of their high temperature. Worldwide fire maps
based
on this data are available to users online in near-real time through
ESA's ATSR
World Fire Atlas (WFA).
Smoke from some of the fires
included in the WFA fire map
was detected during the same period by Envisat’s Medium
Resolution Imaging
Spectrometer (MERIS) optical instrument. While working in Full
Resolution mode
to provide a spatial resolution of 300 metres, MERIS captured smoke
plumes
arising from fires raging across Greece's
southern Peloponnese
peninsula, where fires
have claimed the lives of at least 60 people since they began four days
ago.
These images are available on
ESA’s MIRAVI website, which
gives access to Envisat’s most recently acquired images.
MIRAVI, short for
MERIS Images RApid VIsualisation, tracks Envisat – the
world’s largest Earth
Observation satellite – around the globe, generates images
from the raw data
collected by MERIS and provides them online within two hours. MIRAVI is
free
and requires no registration.
MERIS is also being utilised in
combination with other
satellite sensors for the Risk-EOS initiative, a series of operational
services
for fire and flood risk management. Risk-EOS is part of the Services
Element of
‘Global Monitoring for Environment and Security’
(GMES), an initiative
supported jointly by ESA and the European Commission. GMES is intended
to
establish an independent European capability for worldwide
environmental
monitoring on an operational basis.
##
Contact:
Contact:
Mariangela D'Acunto
European Space Agency
39-069-418-0856
mariangela.dacunto@esa.int
This text derived from:
http://www.esa.int/esaEO/SEMLMOLPQ5F_index_0.html
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