Estimation of Wildfire Spread Rate from Geostationary Satellite Data

Fire Spread Rate (FSR) is one of the key factors for fire rescue and prevention. Remote sensing images have an advantage of acquiring intuitive information timely. To achieve extracting real-time FSR from remote sensing data, a method based on the movement rate of burned area centroid is presented in this study. The FSR extracted from geostationary Himawari-8 (H-8) data in two bushfires outbroke in Esperance, Western Australia in 2015. And the FSR estimated from CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization) Grassland Fire Spread Model (CGFSM) were set as the benchmark to assess the presented approach. The results illustrated that the proposed method yield a promising accuracy by comparing with the FSR from CGFSM in that two fires, with the coefficient of determination (R2) reaches to 0.76 and root-mean-square error (RMSE) is 0.50 m·s
^-1
. Furthermore, this study provides a potential application of geostationary satellite in extracting real-time wildfire behavior.