A series of large Arctic wildfires burned in the remote region of Magadan in Siberia/Russia in the summer of 2023. One example of such a fire is shown here, located at roughly 64.9N and 154.6E. The fire broke out in late June 2023. It burned very quickly and had already consumed over 700 km2 in only 3-4 days. For comparison, the entire area of Oslo municipality is only just over 400 km2. As part of the SPARKS project we estimated the burnt area of the fire using the MSI instrument onboard of Sentinel-2. We found that by the cut-off date of 19 August 2023, the fire had consumed a total area of 822 km2.

Estimating burned area from Sentinel-2/MSI data for the example fire in Magadan Oblast, Russia. False-color image before the fire (top left), false color image after the fire (top center), difference in normalized burn ratio (top right and bottom left), binary mask of the burned area determined from the difference in normalized burn ratio (bottom center), and vectorized polygon of the burned area derived from the binary mask (bottom right).

Published by philipp