Recent wildfires have ravaged Canada, with hundreds of reported incidents. Many of these wildfires remain uncontained, revealing the limitations of existing suppression strategies when confronted with unprecedented conditions. The thick haze of smoke they produced blanketed cities as far as the United States. The newly developed Fire Occurrence Probability Index (FOPI) aims to enhance fire danger predictions by combining the widely used Canadian fire weather index with observations of Vegetation Optical Depth from ESA’s SMOS mission, serving as an indicator of fuel quantity and moisture.
The full animation (seen from www.earthimaginjournal.com) first shows the number of days between May 1-31, 2023, that the FOPI for Canada and the northern part of the United States was more than 0.7, and then fire hot spots using data from two MODIS satellite sensors. FOPI values range from 0 to 1; 0 being no danger, and 0.8 and above being extreme danger.
Image Credit: ESA (data sources: ECMWF/ESA, NASA)
