Monitoring burn severity and air pollutants in wildfire events using remote sensing data: the case of Mersin wildfires in summer 2021

Abstract

Remotely sensed data have been used to investigate air pollutants and matter toxicity, land cover changes and burn severity. The goal of this study is to analyze land and atmospheric data for wildfire events that occurred in Mersin Province between July 28 and August 3, 2021. We used a variety of open-access remotely sensed data sets (MODIS, Sentinel 2A and Sentinel 5P TROPOMI) from the pre-fire (20-27 July), fire (28 July – 3 August), and post-fire period (4-10 August). This comprehensive study's findings can be divided into two categories. The first group is the land cover output, which includes maps of the affected region's land surface temperature and burn severity, as well as comparisons of the two. The atmospheric output, which consists of trace gas column density maps (for carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, sulphur dioxide and ozone), is the second group. The quantitative results of these analyses indicate that high severity areas correspond to 16.536 hectares, and the maximum column number density reached to 0.071 mol/m2 for carbon monoxide, 0.0043 mol/m2 for formaldehyde, 0.00049 mol/m2 for sulphure dioxide and 0.137 mol/m2 for ozone. The burn severity is found to be highly correlated with land surface temperatures. Pollutant levels in the atmosphere were found to be rising during and after the wildfire. There has not been any evidence of a significant increase in air pollutants near urban areas. However, ozone concentrations rose significantly after the wildfire because the province's nitrogen oxide levels were high enough to produce ozone.