Overview¶
Following the previous chapters’ exploration of spectral indices, this chapter aims to calculate burn areas for different forest fires in Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in 2018 and 2019.
While there are Copernicus services that provide forest fire observation services, a lot of the fires during the active wildfire season in Germany are not covered by them. Nevertheless these fires have lasting impacts in their ecosystems and are a contributor to CO2 emissions, which serves as the motivation to see if additional information can be gained by looking closely at the Sentinel-2 data.
After an evaluation of the feasibility of a detailed look at the entire area of Brandenburg for an entire year this chapter defines three forest fires for which media coverage during the active fire and government reports at a later point provide sufficient information. It goes on to analyze the Copernicus data to see if media coverage during the active fire could have been improved by incorporating Sentinel-2 data.
For this purpose the Delta Normalized Burn Ratio (dNBR) is introduced, which is an index combining the Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR) of an observation before and after the fire to provide an indicator for change in burn severity in a given area.