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News

  • June 2026

    Sense4Fire at the 14th EARSeL Workshop on Forest Fires 2026 in Lisbon

    The Sense4Fire team showcased advancements in near-real-time (NRT) and high-resolution monitoring of fire-related dynamics across African savannahs at the 14th EARSeL Workshop on Forest Fires, held in Lisbon from 25–26 June 2026.
     
    Daniel Kinalczyk presented Estimating Fuels and Fire Emissions in Near Real Time in African Savannahs, highlighting a novel setup that enables real-time application of the TUD-S4F model. This approach integrates a forecasted time series of the Copernicus Global Land Service Leaf Area Index (LAI) with near-real-time burnt area estimates derived from the GFA-S4F method. The integration allows for timely and accurate assessments of fuel loads, fuel moisture, combustion efficiency, and fire emissions—delivered with minimal temporal latency. [Presentation PDF]
     
    Complementing this work, Matthias Forkel presented Fuels and Fire Emissions at 20 m Spatial Resolution in African Savannahs, unveiling the first high-resolution results from the TUD-S4F framework at 0.0002° (~20 m) resolution. Leveraging the new Sentinel-2-based FireCCIS211 multi-year burnt area product from the FireCCI team and a high-resolution downscaled LAI, the approach delivers unprecedented spatial detail in fuels and fire emissions. Initial results demonstrate strong consistency with coarser-resolution outputs (300 m), while significantly enhancing the spatial granularity of fire and fuel assessments. [Poster PDF]
     
    The datasets generated from these studies—spanning NRT fuel and emission estimates and high-resolution fire dynamics—will be publicly released in September 2026, further advancing open science and supporting fire science  and climate-carbon cycle research across Africa.

     

  • March 2026

    GRL paper about fire emissions in South America in 2024

    Wildfires that swept across the Amazon in 2024 were the most devastating in more than two decades. A new paper published in Geophysical Research Letters from the Sense4Fire project suggests that emissions may have been up to three times higher than earlier estimates.

    de Laat, A.T.J., Andela, N., Forkel, M., Huijnen, V., Kinalczyk, D., van Wees, D. (2026).
    Sentinel-5p Reveals Unexplained Large Wildfire Carbon Emissions in the Amazon in 2024
    Geophysical Research Letters 53, e2025GL115123. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025GL115123

    ESA publsihed a news article about this paper.

    The Sense4Fire datasets used in this paper are available under Datasets (Database version 3).

     

  • June 2025

    Sense4Fire at ESA's Living Planet Symposium

    ESA’s Living Planet Symposia are among the world’s premier events on Earth observation. In 2025, it takes place in Vienna, Austria, from 23-27 June. The Sense4Fire team has two presentations at LPS:

    Matthias Forkel et al.: Novel Earth observation data-model fusion approaches reveal dominant role of woody debris in fire emissions in the Amazon and Cerrado (Tuesday 24.06.2025, 14:00, Session A.03.04 Model-data interfaces and the carbon cycle, Room 1.34)

    Daniel Kinalczyk and Matthias Forkel: Quantifying the effect of bush encroachment on fuels and fire emissions in southern Africa with a satellite-based data-model fusion approach (Wednesday 25.06.2025, 17:45, Poster A.02.08 Impacts of fire in the Earth system, Room X5, Zone L-M)