Fires can be identified from space using a combination of instruments. Active fires release smoke and particulate matter into the atmosphere, which can have huge health impacts on people living downwind, potentially causing thousands of deaths due to respiratory problems (see recent Indonesian fires for example). Monitoring the start and spread of these plumes is vital in terms of planning short-term responses, but also in considering how to deal with these this problem in the future.

Smoke plumes from large wildfires are often visible from space in the visible part of the optical domain, but judging the intensity of a given fire requires a wider range of measurements, such as the temperature of the fire (from the thermal part of the spectrum, at much longer wavelengths than the optical domain, around 10-12 microns), or the area and density of vegetation that is being burnt. Fires convert fuel (vegetation biomass) into atmospheric gases, particularly CO and CO2 as well as other gases and soot particulates. So measuring the loss of canopy can tell us about the release of these gases into the atmosphere, with the potential damage that can do .

Once a fire is out, burn scar maps (which show the area of surface affected by fire), can be produced using optical satellite data. These maps are among the Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) as they provide a measure of the area of Earth’s surface affected by fire. Remember that burned area is only part of the fire story, and doesn’t tell us how much vegetation has burned; for that we need to know something about the intensity of the fires and the proportion of vegetation that was burned.

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