A constellation of satellites and drones, the first at heights higher than 800 kilometers from Earth, serve data to the emergency operation to stand up as precisely as possible to a fire in Tenerife with devastating characteristics never seen in the history of Canary Islands.
The satellites are part of the Information System on Fires (EFFIS) of the European Union. 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 command posts of the Island through the General Directorate of Civil Protection and Emergencies of the State Government, the body that receives the information from Copernicus. This family of Sentinel satellites was already decisive in monitoring the La Palma volcanic eruption of 2021.
Moisés Sánchez, director of the 112 Emergency and Security Coordination Center of the Canary Islands, assures that this source of data allows not only monitoring the hot fire zones, but also to know what degree of affection has each area through which the flames have passed and the damage they have caused to infrastructure, homes and other assets. “The contribution of these satellites greatly facilitates the choice of strategies to fight the fire,” says Sánchez.
It demonstrated its effectiveness in the toughest moments of the pandemic and allowed the Tajogaite volcano to be monitored 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 ‘constellation’ of European satellites sends maps and data very valuable to control the fire
It is a technology that, as corroborated by the different sources consulted by the Efe news agency, is already contributing effectively to minimize economic, environmental damage and the human losses caused by the firestorms that this summer have shaken Tenerife, La Palma, Greece, Italy, the United States, Canada, Algeria and Tunisia with special virulence.
The satellites are allowing monitor the evolution of the fire in almost real time which has been shaking Tenerife in recent days 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 in recent days.
The device also uses the ‘ES-Alert’ to send warnings and drones with thermal cameras
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.
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 governmentthe 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.
