According to the Korea Forest Service, there are currently about 567 wildfires occurring in South Korea on average over a 10-year period (2014 to 2023). As the years go by, the frequency of large wildfires is increasing, leading to a significant rise in wildfire damages. To prevent and respond to wildfires effectively, South Korea is expanding the scope of utilizing remote sensing technologies such as drones and satellites every year.

Monitoring Wildfires using Satellite Imagery🔎

With satellite images, we can identify active wildfires due to smoke or heat, assess the extent of damage post-fire, and get precise help for the affected areas. So, would you like to explore the process through which satellite imagery is utilized?

Detecting the Area of wildfire Damage With Satellite Photos

There are many ways to use satellite images to find forest fire damage. Lately, thanks to better artificial intelligence, there's also a lot of work on creating models that can detect these disaster areas.

The wildfire that started in Gangneung-si at 11 PM on April 4, 2019, was put out a day later. The RGB satellite images we often use can really help figure out when and where a forest fire happened.

Nara Space used the Sentinel-2 satellite's short-wave infrared (SWIR)* band, along with the vegetation index (NDVI)* and normal moisture index (NDWI)*, to zoom in on wildfires. This way, they can identify the areas that heat up during a blaze.

SWIR (Short wave infrared) : This is a part of the infrared, between 3.5 to 4.0 micrometers.
NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) : This is used to measure how plants are healthy.
NDWI (Normalized Difference Water Index) : This shows how much water is in plants or on the ground.

By compositing and enhancing the bands of satellite imagery, similar to the example mentioned above, it becomes possible to identify areas of uncontrolled wildfires after their occurrence. In disasters such as large-scale wildefire, detecting the area damaged by disaster is considered one of the essential processes for establishing future damage recovery plans.In addition, it can be used to calculate the area of disaster-damaged areas.

Although RGB (True Color) satellite images can show the disaster area with a purple color, it only shows simple visual information and it is not easy to determine the exact damaged area. Therefore, as mentioned earlier, accurate detection of the extent is important in order to calculate the damaged area.

Tackle Forest Fire Damage in One Go with Satellite Imagery!

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