The satellites are part of the European Union’s Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS). It uses data from the Sentinel-3A satellite, belonging to Copernicus, the EU’s Earth observation program, and works as a thermometer that measures infrared radiation from the sky to calculate the temperature of the Earth’s surface, in order to detect any hot spot, no matter how small.
The numerous maps and data reach the island’s command posts through the State Government’s General Directorate of Civil Protection and Emergencies, the body that receives the information from Copernicus. This family of Sentinel satellites was already decisive in monitoring the volcanic eruption of The Palm of 2021.
Moisés Sánchez, director of the Emergency and Security Coordination Center 112 of the Canary Islands, ensures that this data source allows not only to monitor the hot areas of the fire, but also to know the degree of affection of each area through which the flames have passed and the damage they have caused to infrastructures, homes and other goods. “The contribution of these satellites greatly facilitates the choice of strategies to fight the fire,” says Sánchez.
It proved its effectiveness in the toughest moments of the pandemic and made it possible to monitor the Tajogaite volcano in real time. Satellite technology and geospatial information have become the new and best ally in the fight against forest fires. The images and data provided by the satellites allow minute-by-minute monitoring of the increasingly devastating forest fires, but above all, they speed up decision-making thanks to simulation, adding all the available variables (geographical or meteorological) to predict what will to be the evolution of fire.
The device also uses the ‘ES-Alert’ to send warnings and drones with thermal cameras
It is a technology that, as corroborated by the different sources consulted by the Efe agency, is already contributing in an effective way to minimizing the economic and environmental damage and the human losses caused by the firestorms that this summer have shaken with special virulence to Tenerife, La Palma Greece, Italy, the United States, Canada, Algeria or Tunisia.
Satellites are allowing the evolution of the fire that has been shaking Tenerife in recent days to be monitored in almost real time and providing numerous images –many of which are being disseminated through social networks– that reveal the real dimension of this catastrophe and reflect the evolution of the fire during the last days.
José Luis Bermejo, head of the Remote Sensing Service of the National Geographic Institute (IGN) of the Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda, observes that geospatial information is “essential” since a map was first used to delimit the perimeter of a fire and, depending on the orography and other factors, try to predict its evolution.
With this technology, after the launch of the first Earth observation satellites in the 1960s, the evolution has been “impressive and exponential,” Bermejo told Efe, who assures that although a fire is always “unpredictable,” science such as cartography and remote sensing “can help identify particularly sensitive areas and aid in prevention, thanks to the indices of combustibility, vegetation or humidity provided by satellite images.”
The person in charge of the IGN differentiates the phases of fire management: prevention, operational fighting and damage estimation and monitoring of the regeneration of the affected area. He details that some satellites are capable of providing images with 30-centimeter resolution and “revisit” the same area every few hours. “The resources on the ground and good management are crucial to direct an emergency or natural catastrophe, and space technology is an invaluable tool for decision-making,” says Bermejo, who values among its advantages “immediacy, availability, the territory that it can cover, compared to the limitations of other technologies such as drones, and that is independent of the accessibility to the area of the catastrophe”. In 2004, the IGN launched the National Remote Sensing Plan to coordinate the efforts of all public administrations in terms of acquisition and exploitation of satellite images. Through this initiative, it collaborates with the Copernicus of the EU and with the new Spanish Space Agency, which has allowed it to provide very high-resolution products since 2021 – up to 75 centimeters – that are available to public administrations.
Satellites are not the only technology used by the device that fights the flames in Tenerife. Another advance that is being decisive in the management of warnings is the ES-Alert protocol. It is a system of notifications to the population through mobile telephone networks, known as reverse 112 and which has been tested until very recently. ES-Alert technology allows Civil Protection authorities to send widespread and immediate alert messages to mobile phones located in an area affected by an emergency or catastrophe. The deployment is part of the measures of the Plan for Connectivity and Digital Infrastructures and the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan.
The ‘constellation’ of European satellites sends maps and data very valuable to control the fire
It is not an application, since no installation is necessary on the phone for the messages to appear. Instead of using the Internet or SMS, it works through a radio frequency connection and reaches the phones that are receiving signals from the telephone antennas. The messages appear automatically on the terminals. Thanks to this system, they can reach anyone wherever they are, in addition to the fact that their shipment can be limited to certain key areas where the emergency occurs.
Moisés Sánchez points out the third technological element used by the operation: drones. For the Corona Forestal fire, there are drones operating with thermal cameras from the company itself. canarian government, the Military Emergency Unit (UME), the National Police and the Forest Fire Intervention and Reinforcement Teams (Eirif). “They can only fly when there are no aircraft but they allow hot spots to be detected and helicopters to make their downloads with great precision,” concludes the director of the 112 Emergency Coordination Center of the Islands.
This is the graph that the European Union Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) offered yesterday about the fire in Tenerife, which is obtained thanks to the images and data provided by Copernicus satellites. This system is part of the Earth Observation Program of the European Union.
