Copernicus Data for Novel High-resolution Wildfire Danger Services in Mountain Regions

Wildfires in forests, pastures and croplands are costly events and threaten human health, infrastructure, forestry, agriculture and biodiversity. In Alpine regions, fires enhance the risk of hazards such as avalanches, mudslides or rock fall because of the combustion of the forest and vegetation layer. Existing systems of the actual forest fire danger are solely based on weather information and do not consider actual surface moisture and vegetation conditions. More so, current fire danger forecasts have only coarse resolutions, which are insufficient given the complex topography of Austria.

CONFIRM aims to use and integrate high-resolution satellite data and services from the European Copernicus programme to develop pre-operational services of fire danger prediction for Austria. Observations from the Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellites are integrated with airborne Laser-scanning (LiDAR) data, high-resolution weather forecasts, socioeconomic and topographic data, and the Austrian fire database to develop a novel, high-resolution and satellite-supported integrated forest fire danger system (IFDS) for Austria. In CONFIRM, we aim to improve the fire danger forecasts by adding information layers on vegetation structure, tree species, forest gaps and fuel moisture, derived from LiDAR and Sentinel data. Both expert-based and machine learning approaches are employed to produce 3-daily forecasts of the fire ignition danger in a spatial resolution of 100m. The development of the IFDS prototype hosted at www.waldbrand.at by BOKU-WALDBAU has followed the requirements gathered from the forest authorities, fire brigades and state warning centers.