What are some of the benefits and limitations of using satellites for fire detection?
The main benefit of using satellites for detecting fires is that they can cover all of Canada on a daily basis at relatively low cost. This makes them effective for detecting fires in remote, unpopulated regions, where conventional fire monitoring is less intensive. Thick smoke plumes from forest fires, often extending several hundred kilometers, can also be identified by means of satellite imagery. Satellite fire detection has some limitations that must be kept in mind when examining the daily fire images: The tests used by the fire algorithm to remove “false alarms” sometimes fail, leading to false records of fires. Li et al. (2000c) found that about 14% of the fires detected are probably false alarms. Given the large number of satellite pixels examined each day across Canada (about 9.5 million), this represents a very low level of noise, on the order of 0.0001%. A fire hotspot can be confirmed if a conical smoke plume is observed emanating from it. However, it is sometimes impossibl
