REMOTE SENSING APPLICATIONS FOR POST-FIRE HAZARD ASSESSMENTS

With the increasing size and frequency of wildfires, there is a continued need to understand the magnitude and longevity fire impact on natural and human-dominated landscapes. Aided by detailed field observations, recent advances in cloud computing offer new opportunities to observe the effects of fire-related hazards at broad spatiotemporal scales via remote sensing. We present an overview of the ongoing work developed under NASA’s Earth Information System (EIS) Fire project to provide increased situational awareness of fire activity and the potential for concurrent and cascading hazards using globally scalable data. Our efforts include near-real time probabilistic assessments of post-fire debris flow hazards and low-latency assessments of burn severity, informed by sub-daily active fire perimeter mapping and pre-fire information. These efforts also support extended monitoring of post-fire vegetation recovery. Research and product development under EIS includes close partnership with operational agencies to ensure that these efforts address community needs such as decision support and expedited data delivery. Current partners for post-fire hazard assessments include, but are not limited to, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the USGS Earth Observations and Science Center (EROS), and the Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) teams. The EIS Fire project leverages NASA’s ongoing development of cloud storage and computing capability to enable rapid public access to existing fire-related products and the computational resources to accelerate the use of NASA remote sensing and model data for new fire science and applications.