The new system


Lake in November - Espoo / Finland

Within the ESA-activity (Promotion of Space Technologies for Supporting the Management of Natural Disasters) in 1999 the project "An operational satellite based real time system to observe and alert forest fires" to be implemented to Finland, has been launched. The list of participants on this project, developing and implementing the operational forest fire alert system, is evidence for the fact, that a forest fire alert system is only one part of a complex system of fire fighting.

The new system will use data from two sources, from NOAAA/AVHRRR and from ERS-2/ATRS. In addition meteorological data, such as forest fire index and lightning data will be included.

The forest fire alert system is only a part of the complex environment in which the fire fighting is performed. This is also evidenced by the different organisations involved in this development for building and integrating Forest Fire Alert System into an operational context.