Validation of the Prototype System for Wildfire Hotspot Detection and Monitoring of the African Sub-Sahara Region:A Case Study of the Horn of Africa Region

Validation of the Prototype System for Wildfire Hotspot Detection and Monitoring of the African Sub-Sahara Region:A Case Study of the Horn of Africa Region

The Italian Space Agency (ASI) recently installed a prototype system for hotspot detection and monitoring (FIRE) at its Broglio Space Centre (ASI/BSC) facility in Malindi (Kenya). FIRE has been developed at ASI Space Geodesy Centre (Matera, Italy) to monitor hotspots in the Mediterranean Regions and successively adapted to monitor hotspots in Sub-Saharan Africa. The FIRE system implements a processing chain that routinely receives Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) data through the EUMECAST Channel and extracts and transforms the SEVIRI data into geocoded reflectance, radiance and brightness temperature images. The Temperature images at 3.9 μm and 10.8 μm are used to detect the local thermal anomalies (hotspot). The time delay between the MSG data acquisition and the hotspot detection by the FIRE system is about 30 min.