Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

For the last two decades the forest fire monitoring using remote sensing has been developed. The purposes of this paper are to present the fire detection by airborne and polar-orbiting satellite (NOAA), and discuss the ability of remote sensing for fire monitoring. Though the subpixel-sized fires as small as 1 ha can be detected by the 3.8 channel, only 10-15% fires are identified, the accuracy is very low. Therefore satellite observations of forest fires can not replace the manned tower and aircraft reconnaisance especially the airborne thermal IR sensor's important application.