Wildfires in Chile in the era of open satellite imagery

fire In English Sentinel-2

Simon Gascoin, 28 janvier 2017

Massive wildfires are in raging Central Chile [1]. Many satellite images of the burning areas were posted in social media, and not only by the official communication outlets of the space agencies [2]. One example is this stunning MODIS image, which was tweeted by @anttilip a few hours after its acquisition by Terra.

There is a growing crowd of remote sensing geeks, who track the evolution of our planet using satellite imagery. This is due to the ever increasing availability of satellite imagery, the distribution of these data as open data, and the development of applications like EOSDIS Worldview or Sentinel-Playground, which enable to explore petabytes of multispectral images in a web browser, without the hassle of downloading and processing the images. These recent advances will undoubtedly contribute to raise awareness about the impact of human activities on the environment, despite all the efforts of Donald Trump’s administration.

[1] The Guardian, Chile battles devastating wildfires: ‘We have never seen anything on this scale’, 25 Jan 2017 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/25/chile-fire-firefighting-international-help

[2] Image of the Day: Fires Blaze in Chile, 24 Jan 2017 http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=89496

Plus d'actualités

BIOMASS, the third launched satellite mission designed at CESBIO !

After SMOS in 2009, and VENµS in 2017, the CESBIO laboratory is very proud to see its third proposed mission, Biomass, reach orbit. As always, it has been a long journey from the idea, at the beginning of the century, to the selection in 2013 as the seventh Earth Explorer Mission by ESA, to the […]

Sentinel-2 reveals the surface deformation after the 2025 Myanmar earthquake

Sentinel-2 captured several clear-sky images of Myanmar before and after the 28 March 2025 earthquake. The animation below shows a 5-day apart sequence of images captured by Sentinel-2B and Sentinel-2C (10 m resolution) near the epicenter located close to Mandalay. The surface slip due to the earthquake follows the Sagaing Fault, a major fault in […]

Evolution de l’altitude de la ligne de neige au cours des 41 dernières années dans le bassin versant du Vénéon (Oisans)

Pour contribuer à caractériser les conditions hydrométéorologiques lors de la crue torrentielle qui a frappé la Bérarde en juin, j’ai analysé une nouvelle série de cartes d’enneigement qui couvre la période 1984-2024 [1]. Grâce à la profondeur temporelle de cette série, on constate que l’altitude de la ligne de neige dans le bassin versant du […]

Rechercher