Fires in L'Aquila: Program Copernicus has been activated
The mapping of the territory is based on high-resolution optical satellite images
Since July 31, the Civil Protection Department, as National Authorised User, has activated the satellite mapping service Copernicus Emergency Management Service, which operates at European level in Rapid Mapping mode, for the mapping of the area of L'Aquila, Aarischia and the Municipality of Pizzoli that from July 30 have been affected by a fire difficult to extinguish. Also, the following day, a second fire on Mount Pettino occurred.
Due to this type of event, the Earth Observation Programme provides support to the Italian institutions responsible for forest fire-fighting such as the Regions, the National Fire Fighters Corps, the Ministry of the Environmen, the Carabinieri and the Civil Protection Department which coordinates the State Fire Fighting Air Fleet through the Unified Air Operations Centre.
The mapping of the territory is produced from high resolution optical satellite images. The perimeter of the areas is obtained through an automatic process based on the calculation of a radiometric index to identify the areas burned, manually controlled and compared with a pre-event image, without any form of validation with the data collected directly on site.
All the generated products are made available via Copernicus Emergency Rapid Mapping service's public access portal to download products in three raster formats (geopdf, geojpg and geotiff) in three resolutions (100, 200 and 300 dpi) and vectorized information content such as shape files (.shp).
Yesterday evening, August 4, for both events the activities of remediation started.
After the event, the Copernicus service will provide the mapping of the Grading, i.e. the level of damage of vegetation.