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The Multi Spectral Instrument (MSI) onboard Sentinel-2 can record the information in Vegetation Red-Edge (VRE) spectral domains. In this study, the performance of the VRE bands on improving land cover classification was evaluated based on a Sentinel-2A MSI image in East Texas, USA. Two classification scenarios were designed by excluding and including the VRE bands. A Random Forest (RF) classifier was used to generate land cover maps and evaluate the contributions of different spectral bands. The combination of VRE bands increased the overall classification accuracy by 1.40 %, which was statistically significant. Both confusion matrices and land cover maps indicated that the most beneficial increase was from vegetation-related land cover types, especially agriculture. Comparison of the relative importance of each band showed that the most beneficial VRE bands were Band 5 and Band 6. These results demonstrated the value of VRE bands for land cover classification.

Fire Spread Rate (FSR) can indicate how fast a fire is spreading, which is especially helpful for wildfire rescue and management. Historically, images obtained from sun-orbiting satellites such as Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) were used to detect active fire and burned area at the large spatial scale. However, the daily revisit cycles make them inherently unable to extract FSR in near real­-time (hourly or less). We argue that the Himawari-8, a next generation geostationary satellite with a 10-min temporal resolution and 0.5–2 km spatial resolution, may have the potential for near real-time FSR extraction. To that end, we propose a novel method (named H8-FSR) for near real-time FSR extraction based on the Himawari-8 data. The method first defines the centroid of the burned area as the fire center and then the near real-time FSR is extracted by timely computing the movement rate of the fire center. As a case study, the method was applied to the Esperance bushfire that broke out on 17 November, 2015, in Western Australia. Compared with the estimated FSR using the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) Grassland Fire Spread (GFS) model, H8-FSR achieved favorable performance with a coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.54, mean bias error of –0.75 m/s, mean absolute percent error of 33.20% and root mean square error of 1.17 m/s, respectively. These results demonstrated that the Himawari-8 data are valuable for near real-time FSR extraction, and also suggested that the proposed method could be potentially applicable to other next generation geostationary satellite data.