Use of MERIS and AATSR Data in Previsional Fire Danger Index Computation System for Alpine Regions

The FWI-tel instantaneous is a system for computing aforest fire risk index; it elaborates instantaneous weathermaps to evaluate fire risk indicator on alpine regions.This system is based on the previsional Canadian FireWeather Index (FWI) adjusted for continental Europelatitudes and climatology and adapted to alpine regionsorography. FWI is a meteorological index, which uses asinput data meteorological forecasts (or analysis), satelliteremote sensed and weather radar data.In the current version of the system, air temperature andrelative humidity data come from MODIS and AIRSsensors, rain data come from MeteoSwiss weather radarsand wind data come from BOLAM Numerical WeatherPrediction models. In particular, relative humidity dataare characterized by a very coarse spatial resolutionwhich makes difficult over complex-orography regionsthe precise localization and evaluation of the fire dangerindex.Furthermore, MERIS relative humidity sensed data, areused as new input for the FWI-tel instantaneous system.The aim of using such data is to compare the resultsobtained with them with the ones obtained by using AIRSdata. In this way it would be possible to evaluate anyimprovement in the instantaneous forest fire danger indexusing MERIS data, with respect to AIRS, in order toobtain a more efficient real time territory monitoringsystem for forest fires over complex-orography regions.As soon as soil moisture data from the SMOS satellitewill be available they too will be included in the indexcomputation. Moreover MERIS vegetation index will beincluded in a future version of the index.