Airborne high resolution remote sensing for near real time fire detection and surveillance

Nowadays, dramatic increases in forest fires can be observed worldwide, even in countries in northern and central Europe, where large forest fires have hardly occurred in the past (e.g. Sweden 2014 and 2018). In order to improve the protection of human lives and resources it is mandatory to support large scale forest firefighting strategies and management solutions with innovative technical developments. The EU has initiated international cooperations and initiatives to provide interoperable systems and information in order to support prevention and firefighting efforts to protect human lives and resources and to reduce the negative environmental impact of these fires to a minimum. For this reason, the Joint Research Centre works closely with European countries and other relevant EC services to monitor forest fires through the European Forest Fire Information System. This article describes an airborne multi-sensor approach to enable an efficient management of airborne operation forces as well as ground forces in frame of natural disaster situations like forest fire or flooding events. The aim is to support tasks and time-critical decision processes in disaster situations by near real-time processing chains as well as end user oriented management solutions.