ABSTRACT
In this study, satellite imagery from Sentinel-3 (S3) Sea and Land Surface Temperature Radiometer (SLSTR) is used to detect active fires over forests (New South Wales, Australia), peatlands (South Sumatera, Indonesia), and croplands (Punjab, India). We selected the above three diverse cases as they have different fire regime characteristics. The S3 SLSTR has two dedicated channels for fire and high-temperature event monitoring at 1 km resolution and has almost similar equatorial satellite time of pass as MODIS Terra. We used a series of tests to detect active fires from the S3 SLSTR, which included masking for clouds, masking specific land-cover types, brightness temperature (BT) thresholding in middle-infrared (MIR) channel at 3.74 µm, and using BT difference between the MIR 3.75 µm versus long-wave infrared channel at 10.75 µm. The results suggested that on average, S3 SLSTR-detected fires were relatively higher than the fires detected by the Terra MODIS and lesser than those detected by Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) (375 m) in all cases tested, i.e., forest, peatland, and agricultural fires. In the chapter, algorithm details and the potential of S3 SLSTR for active fire mapping and monitoring have been presented.
