The use of NOAA/AVHRR satellite data for monitoring and assessment of forest fires and floods

Abstract

Abstract. The increasing number of extreme natural phenomena, which are related to the climate variability and are mainly caused by anthropogenic factors, escalate the frequency and severity of natural disasters. Operational monitoring of natural hazards and assessment of the affected area impose quick and efficient methods based on large-scale data, readily available to the agencies. The growing number of satellite systems and their capabilities give rise to remote sensing applications to all types of natural disasters, including forest fires and floods. Remote sensing techniques can be used in all three aspects of disaster management viz: forecasting, monitoring and damage assessment. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of satellite remote sensing for monitoring and near-real time assessment of the affected by forest fires and floods areas. As a tool, two satellite indices are presented, namely the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and the Surface Temperature (ST), extracted by the meteorological satellite NOAA/AVHRR. In the first part of the paper, a review of utilized techniques using NDVI and ST is given. In the second part, the application of various methodologies to three case studies are presented: the forest fire of 21-24 July 1995 in Penteli Mountain near Athens and 16 September 1994 in Pelion Mountain in Thessaly region, central Greece, and finally the flood of 17-23 October 1994 in Thessaly region, central Greece. For all studies the NDVI has been utilized for hazard assessment. The method of ST has been applied to the flood event in Thessaly, for the estimation of the areal extent of the floods. As emerged from the studies, remote sensing data can be decisive for monitoring and damage assessment, caused by forest fires and floods.

Spatial and temporal variations of chlorophyll-a concentration from 2009 to 2012 in Poyang Lake, China

“…There are several water surface area extraction methods, such as the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) (Domenikiotis et al 2003;Lunetta et al 2006), the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) (Jain et al 2005;Xu 2006), the spectrum-photometric method (Zhou et al 2003), etc. The Floating Algae Index (FAI) method was a new method introduced in 2009 (Hu 2009).…”

Improving flood monitoring by the Robust AVHRR Technique (RAT) approach: the case of the April 2000 Hungary flood

“…McFeeters 1996, Hasegawa et al 1998, Domenikiotis et al 2003, Wang et al 2003, Jain et al 2005, Liu et al 2005 and references therein) and Surface Temperature (ST) (e.g. Domenikiotis et al 2003) have also been proposed in order to provide information that is useful for flooding-damage assessment purposes.…”

Flood risks in urbanized areas – multi-sensoral approaches using remotely sensed data for risk assessment

“…footprints as well as the derivation of flood masks. For up-to-date monitoring, radar sensors are preferred due to their cloud penetrating capability (Brakenridge et al, 2003). Examples for similar missions are CosmoSkymed, Radarsat or ALOS.…”

“…During the past decades airborne and spaceborne remote sensing technology along with geographic information systems (GIS) have become the key tool for flood monitoring (Brivio et al, 2002;Horritt et al, 2003;Mason et al, 2007;Nirupama and Simonovic, 2007;Sanyal and Lu, 2004;Wang, 2004;Voigt et al, 2007;Zhang et al, 2008). Development in this field has evolved from optical to radar remote sensing, which has provided an all-weather capability compared to the optical sensors for the purpose of flood mapping.…”

“…Sect. 2) and the improvement of image analysis techniques, remote sensing enables accurate and timely analysis of satellite data recorded during or shortly after a flooding event to obtain current information on de facto impacts (Domenikiotis et al, 2003;Voigt et al, 2007). Delineation of flooded areas in various optical data sets is commonly based on the assumption that water has very low reflectance in the near-infrared portion of the spectra.…”