Fire-prone areas delineated from a combination of the Nesterov Fire-risk Rating Index with multispectral satellite data

Traditional fire-risk rating indices are founded on statistical relations between pre-event meteorological conditions and the number of fire outbreaks observed in a forested area. However, traditional weather-based indices cannot render information on the spatial distribution of fire-susceptible sites over extensive forested areas because their only inputs are meteorological observations made at sparsely distributed weather stations. Therefore, only an area-averaged value of the risk of fire can be obtained from these indices. This disadvantage can be relieved by using remote sensing data from polar-orbiting satellites scanning the Earth's surface in the visible and thermal spectral regions. This paper presents a synthesis of the Nesterov Fire-rating Index, an index extensively used in Central and Eastern Europe—and how this was merged with the Temperature–Vegetation Dryness Index (TVDI) derived from multispectral images scanned by Landsat ETM+. This paper demonstrates the methodology of how TVDI was merged with the Nesterov Index to give a map of the spatial patterns of fire-prone sites. The test region is located in a pine-forested (dominated by Pinus sylvestris ) area in western Slovakia. Our investigation suggests that coupling TVDI with the Nesterov Index, or any other weather-based fire-rating index, can become an effective tool for delineating areas prone to fire outbreaks even in regions with insufficient coverage of weather stations.