Operational wildfire monitoring and disaster management support using state-of-the-art EO and Information Technologies

The National Observatory of Athens (NOA) has been established in Greece as a research institute offering, among others, operational services for disaster management of forest wildfires. In this paper the main activities of NOA related to fire monitoring and the Burn Scar Mapping damage assessment services are presented. The current capacities in delivering fire-related products and services are greatly enhanced by the integration of state-of-the-art Information Technologies, which provide the potential of refining the thematic accuracy of our products, allows the connection to other distributed databases for the generation of new and innovative added-value products, and suggest the establishment of an operational system that can be extended to include other applications related to natural disaster management.