Canada is burning heavily once again. The smoke from the huge wildfires is now heading towards Norway and the rest of Europe.
On May 31, the CO plume from the fires, measured by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI), spread north towards Greenland and also towards southern Scandinavia.
For additional information, see the NILU news By: Christine Forsetlund Solbakken
Published: 30.05.2025
On April 9, 2025 at approximately 19:30, a wildfire erupted on the island of Sotra, west of Bergen, Norway. The fire spread quickly through dry vegetation, intensified by windy conditions, prompting a substantial response from local emergency services. Firefighters from seven nearby stations, supported by helicopters conducting aerial water drops, worked intensely together with civil defense to contain the blaze despite challenging terrain. The rocky, steep landscape made firefighting efforts difficult, yet crews managed to extinguish the flames later that night. Authorities considered evacuating nearby residents due to concerns that the fire might spread toward inhabited areas, but fortunately, the fire was brought under control before evacuation became necessary. The precise cause of the wildfire remains unclear but an investigation by the police was carried out to clarify the circumstances surrounding the event.
Following the fire, researchers at NILU involved in the Sparks projects utilized satellite imagery to map and assess the impacted area. They employed Sentinel-2 multispectral data to compare conditions before and after the fire, creating false-color images to highlight changes in vegetation health clearly. Unburned vegetation appeared green in images taken prior to the blaze, while burnt areas were distinguishable by their characteristic reddish-brown hues afterward. To quantify the damage, researchers calculated the difference in the Normalized Burn Ratio (dNBR), a standard remote sensing metric used for evaluating wildfire impacts, highlighting the areas of most severe damage. Further analysis included applying a land mask to exclude water bodies and using Otsu’s automated thresholding method to differentiate burned from unburned areas. The resulting binary classification allowed researchers to vectorize the affected region, delineating the extent of damage precisely. According to this satellite-based assessment, the wildfire burned approximately 0.22 square kilometers of terrain.
This detailed mapping demonstrates the critical role satellite imagery plays in assessing damage from wildfires. Rapid assessments provide essential information to emergency responders and environmental agencies, supporting effective recovery measures, ecological impact evaluations, and improved preparedness for future events. Given increasing wildfire risks in Norway associated with climate change and evolving land-use patterns, using Earth observation technologies for swift, accurate damage assessments becomes increasingly important for safeguarding both communities and ecosystems.
See the new SPARKS data viewer at: https://arctic-atmosphere.nilu.no/Fire
Join us for the Forest Fire Seminar at the Norwegian Space Agency
see Skogbrannseminar for registration.
How can earth observation from satellites contribute to a better understanding of and response to forest fires?
Date / Time: November 5, 2024, 09:00 AM-03:00 PM at the Norwegian Space Agency
In cooperation with Nilu and Tartu Observatory, we welcome you to a seminar on forest fires and earth observation. There will be presentations from Nilu and Tartu Observatory on their project on Arctic Peat- and Forest Fires, as well as other relevant projects.
The SPARKS website shows in Near-Real-Time the location of fires and their emissions. Below is an example shown from 7 September 2024 for the region of Ukraine. The unusual high number of fires in Eastern Ukraine shows the frontline of the Russian war against the country.
Below we zoom in on an example fire, which is marked with a black square. The active fires at the fire front as well as the aerosol emissions can be seen.
Meet us at the ESA ATMOS 2024 conference in Bologna, Italy, 1. Juli 2024 – 5. Juli 2024
On Day 4, Thursday, July 4, 2024, 14:22- 14:34 Johannes Kaiser will talk about
see the oral presentation
Meet us at the ESA ATMOS 2024 conference 1-5 July 2024, Bologna, Italy – see our poster
A small grass fire burned in the night of 28 April 2024 on the island of Vågsøy, which lies circa 80 km southwest of the town of Ålesund. The fire burned in very steep and inaccessible terrain, which made fighting the fire challenging. Nonetheless, the firefighters were available to extinguish the fire within ca. 6 hours. in the course of the night. Despite the small size of the fire, its impacts were visible from space. The SPARKS burned area algorithm based on data from the Sentinel-2/MSI instrument estimated a total burned area of approximately 12.3 hectares. More information about the fire can be found here (in Norwegian).
Johannes Kaiser from NILU’s SPARKS team is holding a presentation entitled “Arctic peat fire emissions estimated from satellite observations of fire radiative power” at the General Assembly of the European Geophysical Union (EGU). The talk will be on Monday, 15 Apr, 09:25–09:35 (CEST) in Room C as part of the session on “The Role of Fire in the Earth System: Understanding Interactions with the Land, Atmosphere, and Society“.
See here for more details about the conference. The summary of the presentation can be found here.
