A Fire Hazard Assessment Using Sentinel Imagery; A Case Study Over Gippsland Australia

Abstract

Accurate and the efficient rapid mapping of the fire-damaged areas are the most fundamental things for any places to retain from environmental loss. To support the fire management, make definite strategy and planning, and restore the vegetation, it is important to detect the area before and after the fire damages. Under climate change conditions, heat and drought may trigger tough fire regimes in terms of number and dimension of fires. To deliver the rapid information of the area damaged by the fires, Burned Area Index (BAI), Normalized Burned Ratio (NBR) and their versions are applied to map burned areas from high-resolution optical satellite data. The new MSI sensor aboard Sentinel-2 satellites records the more spectral information in the red edge spectral region making it more convenient to the development of new indices for the burned area mapping. Recently, Australia had confronted a devastating bushfire recorded in the history of the nation. In this project, NBR deployed to detect burned areas at around 10m-20m spatial resolution based on pre and post-fire Sentinel-2 images. A dNBR (differentiated Normalized Burned Ratio) was calculated while burn severity was mapped as purposed by United States Geological Survey (USGS). It observed that more than half of the East Gippsland region i.e. about 53% of the area affected by the wildfire while 38% remained unburned and 8.4% showed the regrowth.