Wildfire is an unintentional fire burning in a natural area, usually a forest, often caused by human activity or by natural phenomenon such as lightning. In the summer of 2019-20, Australia was hit by a severe bushfire, which led to an estimated death of 1.25 billion animals, up to 19 million hectares were burned, 12.6 million of which are forest and bushes, destroyed 3,094 homes, and killed 33 humans.
While there are existing methodologies to assess the severity of forest fires, there are no existing systems at the moment to compute for post-fire damage of an area on-the-fly. The aim of this study is to create a web based application to assess the severity of the forest fire. The processing algorithm will be based on the United Nations’ Recommended Practice for Burn Severity Mapping, and will be using Google Earth Engine’s freely and ready-to-use Data Catalog. The NIR and SWIR of Sentinel 2 (Bands 8A and 12), or NIR and SWIR2 of Landsat 8 (Bands 5 and 7) are recommended for use to calculate the Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR) to assess the burn severity.
The main goal of this web application is for stakeholders and laymen to compute post fire damage without the need to dig deep on the technical aspects of the topic.