Geoinformation for Disaster and Risk Management - ISPRS

Detection and Monitoring of
Wildfires by a Constellation of
Small Satellites with Infrared
Sensor Systems
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Dieter Oertel , Eckehard Lorenz , Winfried Halle
1:Astro- und Feinwerktechnik Adlershof GmbH, Albert-Einstein-
Str. 12, D-12489 Berlin, Germany, Tel.: +49 172 9450074, Fax:
+49 35477 51778, e-mail: kdoertel@t-online.de
2: Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, Rutherfordstr. 2,
D-12489 Berlin, Germany
FIntroduction
Fire activity is a global phenomenon characterized
by strong spatial and temporal variability. Wildfire
is an important ecosystem disturbance with varying
return frequencies, resulting in land cover alteration
and change, and atmospheric emissions on multiple
time scales. Catastrophic wildfires in the last few
years have again stressed that sound fire
management decisions (including justification of a
possible severity ranking) on the deployment of fire
fighters and of limited technical equipment on the
ground, rely very much on timely and detailed
information on location, intensity, direction and rateof-spread
of the fire fronts.
Figure 1: Micro-satellite for Bi-spectral InfraRed
Detection (BIRD) on Low Earth Orbit (LEO)
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