Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 for Fire Monitoring at a Local Scale: a Case Study on Vesuvius

The aim of this paper is to show how the use of open access medium and high resolution multispectral images can support institutional actors in fire monitoring, mainly in order to accurately assess fire damages but also, if necessary, to detect the fire front under smoke clouds. The use of open data in comparison with other paid solutions is to remark because of great interest to public and private end users. In this paper a novel approach is suggested in order to effectively process multispectral images, from the NASA and ESA missions Landsat8 and Sentinel-2, in order to extract common products, useful to detect active fires and evaluate the position and extension of the burned areas. The proposed approach has demonstrated to produce satisfactory results in terms of classification accuracy and moreover the joint use of images from Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2, by increasing the overall availability of data, allows also to overcome some limitations on time delivery and high frequency observation, requirements that instead are goodly matched through the use of lower resolution hyperspectral images such as those from MODIS and VIIRS satellites. The proposed method has been successfully tested on Vesuvius, that was devastated by terrible fires on the of 11th July 2017. Respect to previous works of the same authors on this topic, further experiments are presented in order to compare the proposed approaches to state of the art methods.