Wildfires | 31 Oct 2019
The latest data from Sentinel-3 World Fire Atlas showed that, compared to August 2018, there were almost five times as many wildfires across the world in August 2019.
- There were 79,000 fires in August 2019 as compared to just over 16,000 fires detected in August 2018.
- 49% (nearly half) of the fires were detected in Asia, around 28% were detected in South America, 16% in Africa, and the remaining were recorded in North America, Europe and Oceania.
- It is to be noted that August and September 2019 were the months which witnessed fires in the Amazon rainforest.
Sentinel-3 World Fire Atlas
- The Sentinel-3 World Fires Atlas Prototype product has been developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) to provide continuity to the ESA Along Track Scanning Radiometers (ATSR) World Fire Atlas, which produced monthly global fire maps from 1995 to 2012.
- It covers the southern countries of the ESA member states.
- This new prototype uses Sentinel-3A and Sentinel-3B data and contains two dedicated channels (F1 and F2) for fire and high temperature events.
- Sentinel-3 is a multi-instrument mission to measure sea-surface topography, sea- and land-surface temperature, ocean colour and land colour with high-end accuracy and reliability.
- It is based on a constellation of two satellites: Sentinel-3A and Sentinel-3B.
- The mission is part of the European Commission Copernicus programme for Earth Observation.