Identify and interpret fields and derived products
Bruno Café introduces satellite products used by operational forecasters for fire detection and monitoring, using the 2025 Portugal fire event as a case study.
This presentation explores the enhanced capabilities of the Flexible Combined Imager (FCI) sensor on board Meteosat-12 (MTG) for forest fire detection and monitoring. By leveraging better spectral, temporal, and spatial resolutions, we demonstrate how new RGB composites, specifically Fire Temperature and True Color RGBs, provide critical advantages in identifying hotspots, smoke plumes, and burn scars.
Sven-Erik Enno introduces the LI instrument and its use for fire detection, while Andrea Meraner provides a data analysis example of a fire related to lightning.
The Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) Lightning Imager (LI), declared operational on October 31, 2024, is a new European Instrument devoted to the real-time monitoring and characterization of lightning activity over Europe, Africa, the eastern part of South America, and a large portion of the Atlantic Ocean. This presentation will demonstrate LI's observational capabilities from hemispherical climatological statistics to local-scale forest fire events. In addition, we show examples of lightning-ignited fires as observed by LI and FCI, the multispectral imager onboard MTG.
Edouard Martins gives a brief introduction on the work of EUMETSAT and then focuses on monitoring thermal hotspots with Sentinel satellites.
EUMETSAT Central Facility (CF) is entrusted by the European Commission for the operational detection and monitoring of high thermal spots (wildfires, gas flares, volcanoes) from the Sentinel-3 (S3) satellites in Near Real Time (NRT), with emergency timeliness. The Copernicus S3 NRT Fire Radiative Power (FRP) observes global wildfires between 500 m and 1 km resolution, both at night and during the day. The public product is today under testing by the two Copernicus services dedicated to atmosphere monitoring and emergency management (CAMS and CEMS). Additionally, it is being completed by NRT quantification of pollutant observation from the Sentinel Constellation (S3 currently, S4 and S5 later on).
Anu-Maija Sundstrom talks about atmospheric composition data used to monitor emissions from forest fires.
This presentation provides an introduction to satellite-based observations of atmospheric emissions from fires provided by AC SAF. It highlights key satellite products used to detect and monitor fire-related pollution, including the Absorbing Aerosol Index from GOME-2 for identifying smoke plumes, carbon monoxide (CO) observations from IASI, and the potential use of other trace gases, including GOME-2 NO₂. Together, these measurements offer complementary insights into the composition, distribution, and evolution of fire emissions, supporting air quality monitoring.
Martin Wooster discusses the LSA SAF Fire Radiative Power (FRP) product derived from geostationary satellite imagery and the improvements in active fire detection offered by MTG compared with MSG.
The session will cover the Geostationary FRP products from the EUMETSAT LSA-SAF that provide a record of active fire detections, fire radiative power (FRP) and smoke and carbon emissions over Europe, Africa and parts of South America, most recently from MTG with significant performance improvements compared to MSG. The methods used, the available products, and their performance will be reviewed in this session.
Carlos da Camara addresses the application of remote sensing for the development of an early warning system for fire danger.
In recent years, Europe has been affected by severe wildfires that are driven by vegetation stress and fire weather, and have severe impacts at social, economic and ecological levels. To assist fire managers and firefighters, the LSA SAF has developed an early warning fire danger system for Europe. The system relies on a set of regional models that provide forecasts of local meteorological fire danger based on statistical models of fire radiative power that use the so-called Fire Weather Index as a covariate. The rationale will be described in detail, and several case studies will be presented.
Célia Gouveia talks about LSA SAF vegetation data used for fire assessments and monitoring.
Fire-prone conditions and the impact of wildfires on vegetation dynamics and productivity are analysed using the land surface temperature (LST) and evaporatranspiration (ET and ETREF) and their impacts on vegetation and products such as Fraction of Absorbed Photosynthetically Active Radiation (FAPAR), Fraction of Vegetation Cover (FVC) and Gross Primary Production (GPP) disseminated by LSA SAF.
This mini-module is part of a series of MTG mini modules produced by EUMETSAT/EUMeTrain with the aim of providing quick and useful learning experience about the new satellite products.
In this exercise you will learn how to use LI data together with ground based measurements.
Enter the mini-module.
This mini-module is part of a series of MTG mini modules produced by EUMETSAT/EUMeTrain with the aim of providing quick and useful learning experience about the new satellite products.
In this exercise you will learn about features in LI data as well as some limitations.
Enter the mini-module.
Pieter Gröenemeijer talks about using the IRS data in the context of convection forecasting.
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Zsofia Kocsis shows a wide range of possible visualizations using IRS Level-2 (L2) test data.
The Infrared Sounder (IRS) onboard the MTG-S1 is the first geostationary sounding instrument to perform measurements over Europe with a temporal resolution of 30 minutes. EUMETSAT will provide temperature and water vapour profiles, together with instability indices derived from these measurements, thereby offering complementary information to Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) model outputs and radiosonde observations for nowcasting applications. In this talk we will show different visualization of IRS Level-2 (L2) test data.
Suzana Panezic talks about using the Okamoto all-sky method in the regional numerical weather prediction model AROME using IASI radiances as proxy.
The InfraRed Sounder (IRS) on MTG-S1 will provide radiance measurements every 30 minutes across 1960 spectral channels, offering new opportunities to improve high-resolution weather forecasts. To fully exploit these data for operational use, assimilation methods are extended beyond clear-sky conditions to include observations affected by clouds. The Okamoto all-sky method is tested in the regional numerical weather prediction model AROME, employing IASI radiances as a proxy until IRS data are available.