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BeZero Carbon is a global ratings agency for the Voluntary Carbon Market. Combining expertise across climate science, finance and policy, it provides ratings, risk, and data tools that improve information accessibility and decision making. Its aim is to build markets for environmental impact. In Sense4Fire, they lead the development of the Global Fire Atlas GFA-S4F approach to map fires and fire emissions in near real time.
Team members: Niels Andela, Dave van Wees
The Professorship in Environmental Remote Sensing at TUD Dresden University of Technology (TUD) leads Sense4Fire. They contact research on remote sensing for forest fire research and management, microwave remote sensing for forest-water interactions, and remote sensing for landscape change and agriculture. In Sense4Fire, they lead the development of the TUD-S4F Earth observation data-model fusion approach for fuel loads, fuel moisture, fuel consumption and fire emissions.
Team members: Matthias Forkel, Daniel Kinalczyk, Johanna Kranz, Xiao Liu, Christopher Marrs, Christine Wessollek
The Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) is the Dutch national weather service and centre for climate research. In Sense4Fire, they develop several approaches based on Snetinel-5p (KNMI-S5p) to benchmark bottom-up fire emission datasets.
Team members: Jos de Laat, Vincent Huijnen
June 2025
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)
June 2025
On June 19, 2025, TU Dresden signed a new contract with the European Space Agency to extend the successful **Sense4Fire** project. The collaboration with the established consortium — **TU Dresden**, **KNMI**, and **BeZero Carbon** — will continue throughout 2025 and 2026, focusing on the development of innovative fire emission products.
Reprocessing of Fire Emission Products for Africa
GFA-S4F v0.3: Reprocessed fire emissions for Africa (2019–2025), based on VIIRS active fire observations and fire type classification from the *Global Fire Atlas* approach. The methodology incorporates improved conversion factors to estimate fuel consumption from fire radiative energy.
TUD-S4F v0.3: Reprocessed fire emissions for Africa (2016–2024), using the TUD-S4F data–model fusion approach. This version integrates updated, high-resolution land cover data from ESA WorldCover.
Development, Validation, and Assessment of Near-Real-Time Fire Emission Products for Africa
TUD-S4F-vNRT02: The TUD-S4F near-real-time setup will be revised and undergo systematic testing. Near-real-time (NRT) fire emission estimates for Africa will be available starting in autumn 2025.
KNMI-S5p: As before, all fire emission estimates will be validated against satellite observations of atmospheric CO and NOx from **Sentinel-5P*.
High-Resolution Fire Emission Estimates
TUD-S4F-vHR01: The TUD-S4F approach will be adapted to high spatial resolution (20 m) to estimate fuel loads and fire emissions in selected African study regions (2016–2025). This will utilize land cover from ESA WorldCover, as well as leaf area index and burned area data derived from Sentinel-2.
January 2025
The Sense4Fire team published together with further collaborators a paper in Nature Geoscience:
In the paper, an intercomparison of several fire emission estimates in presented for the fire season 2020 in the Amazon and Cerrado. Then the contribution of different fire types and fuel components to the total fire emissions are investigated, showing that emissions are dominated by smouldering combustion of woody debris.
ESA also published an article about the paper along with a very nice animation of the key results.
All datasets related to the paper are open available at https://doi.org/10.25532/OPARA-688 and at this website under "Data".