Multicriteria Severity Indicator Using Remote Sensing for Forest Firefighting Dispatch in the Brazilian Amazon

Fire fighting in the Amazon region faces a wide range of challenges, such as scarce information, limited resources and access difficulty. The knowledge of spatial and temporal distributions of fires is crucial to understand their severity. To improve the efficiency of firefighting dispatching, this work developed a near realtime fire severity-level indicator using remote sensing data. It uses information from NOAA-20 and Suomi NPP satellites to monitor fire events according to the level of attention they require based on four criteria: total size, duration, expansion and intensity. The spatial scope of the indicator covers the Brazilian Amazon and Pantanal biomes. The indicator application is demonstrated in a real case study of an overflight with firefighters in the southeast of Porto Velho.

1. Introduction

Every year the Amazon region sees an increase in forest fires during the drought season. Fires can occur naturally or can be caused by anthropic activities [6]. The latter is predominant and mainly linked to deforestation, pasture maintenance and farm-fallow agriculture [4]. Recent fires in the Brazilian Amazon have attracted world-wide attention, especially for high numbers of active fires registered in 2019 and 2020 [7].