Wildfire mapping with Interferometric ICEYE SAR data

There has been a significant increase in wildfires in recent years due to climate change, which is having an increasing impact on human settlements, infrastructure, buildings and the environment [1]. The statistics published by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection states that the area affected by fires in 2021 (2.6 million acres) is approximately 47% higher than the average over the last five years of 1.6 million acres [2].  Mitigating and preventing wildland fires is a crucial task that involves strategic planning and detailed monitoring of fire activity.

Many remote sensing techniques have been established to aid emergency responders  with the immediate planning and actions to be taken in the event of wildfire. Synthetic Aperture Radar’s (SAR) capability of penetrating the clouds and smoke offers a unique advantage for monitoring the progression of wildfire, which can be quite challenging to contain [3]. The capability of coherent change detection applied to interferometric SAR images for describing changes associated with wildfire is presented here. The coherence from interferometric SAR has been shown in many case studies to be an effective tool for monitoring deforestation and forest fires [4].  An increase in time interval between images leads to increased variation in the scatterer’s distribution which results in lower coherence values, which can reduce the usefulness of this method. The value of coherence is much more evident in forest areas when a shorter interval between subsequent images can be utilized. .

The Rum Creek fire burned 21,347 acres in southwest Oregon, USA, which was ignited by lightning strikes on August 17, 2022 and continued for nearly a month. Two ICEYE stripmap SAR images (August 26, 2022 and August 28, 2022) captured the scene during the fire event and demonstrated the effectiveness of using interferometric SAR methods in detecting the burn scars. The results show good agreement with the fire perimeter released by the Wildland Fire Interagency Geospatial Services (WFIGS) Group [5].

 

References:

   [1] A. Borunda, “The science connecting wildfires to climate change”, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/climate-change-increases-risk-fires-western-us

   [2] California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection  [online]  https://www.fire.ca.gov/stats-events/

  [3] A. Moreira, P. Prats-Iraola, M. Younis, G. Krieger, I. Hajnsek and K. P. Papathanassiou, "A tutorial on synthetic aperture radar," in IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 6-43, March 2013, doi: 10.1109/MGRS.2013.2248301.

  [4] S. Takeuchi and S. Yamada, "Monitoring of forest fire damage by using JERS-1 InSAR," IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, 2002, pp. 3290-3292 vol.6, doi: 10.1109/IGARSS.2002.1027159.

 [5] The Wildland Fire Interagency Geospatial Services [online] https://data-nifc.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/nifc::wfigs-current-wildland-fire-perimeters/about