Study on METEOSAT - SEVIRI Operational Fire Products
2004

As an independent expert, Stephane Flasse carried out this study for EUMETSAT (http://www.eumetsat.int).

This feasibility study on SEVIRI operational fire product was to support EUMETSAT in their phase of identification and prioritisation of the most relevant information for end-users, and consequently a review and analysis of existing approaches to reach such information, leading to recommendations on the way forward in terms of additional research and feasibility required before reaching an Algorithm Technical Background Document (ATBD).

The objectives of this study were the definition of the product and its information for a SEVIRI “forest fire”, providing a basis for the subsequent selection and specification of SEVIRI operational fire products, with focus on the basic products that can be useful to existing approaches used by fire information end-users, and in particular on:

• Over Europe : a near real time fire risk assessment product;
• Over Africa : active fire detection and burned area mapping, with emphasis on better documentation of fire impact on climatic, atmospheric and ecological processes.

The first recommendation from this study was that SEVIRI fire product initially focuses on providing information in support to the Global Change Community, and in particular to support the assessment of fire impacts on the atmosphere radiative transfer.

The relationship M=BB*E _f is commonly used by global change community to assesses biomass burning emissions, where:

M is the quantity of gas or particles emitted,
BB is the quantity of biomass burned,
and E _f is the corresponding emission factor.

Typically, BB is in turned calculated using assessment of fuel load (total vegetation biomass) and burned areas.

The most relevant existing knowledge and approaches to potentially retrieve appropriate information from SEVIRI has been investigated accordingly, and is presented in this report.

Consequently, the second recommendation from this study was that SEVIRI fire product focuses on Fire Radiative Energy (FRE).

FRE is a well defined physical quantity. Several studies indicate that it is proportional to the quantity of biomass burned. FRE would therefore allow a direct estimation of BB, without requiring the difficult assessment of fuel load and burned areas. Approaches for the retrieval of the rate of energy emitted by the fire are still recent but show good potential, and its time integration thanks to SEVIRI’s 15 min cycle will allow the best assessment of FRE, never previously possible so far. Before a full product and approach can be defined, a series of issues need to be investigated.

Finally, it was suggested to look at Fuel Moisture Content and Burned Area information as second priority.

Page last updated June 26, 2008