The use of MSG-SEVIRI for rapid detection of security-related events

New fields of application have been discovered for data acquired by geostationary satellite sensors, like MSG-SEVIRI (Meteosat Second Generation-Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager), beyond their original meteorological and climatologic scopes. Unexpected MSG-SEVIRI potentials have been, for instance, revealed in different security-related applications. In fact, several accidents (e.g., pipeline sabotages, bombing, etc.), responsible for injuries to citizens and damages to critical infrastructures, often cannot be avoid or foreseen, but a rapid detection of their effects may allow to timely intervene and prevent more terrible consequences. Meteorological satellites like MSG-SEVIRI, characterized by a high temporal repetition rate, give the possibility to rapidly detect abrupt thermal transients related to dangerous explosions. Anyway, if MSG-SEVIRI data may provide information at an adequate temporal resolution (from 15 to 5 minutes, over areas acquired in Rapid Scanning Service mode), a suitable technique is to be used to identify, in a reliable fashion (i.e., no false alarms), actual accidents. The multi-temporal change detection algorithm, RST (Robust Satellite Techniques), may assure such a reliability because it is based on the characterization (in space and time) of the medium infrared (MIR) satellite signal, so that it is possible, for example, to distinguish “temporary heat sources” (hot spots related to actual accidents) from “permanent heat sources” (e.g., normally hot areas in correspondence of refineries chimneys). A processing chain, based on the RST approach, has been also developed for automatically identifying, on MSG-SEVIRI images, harmful events. Maps of thermal anomalies may be generated every 15 minutes over a selected area, together with *.kml files for a rapid visualization of the accident position on GoogleEarth® environment. RST applied to MSG-SEVIRI in security field has been tested in different contexts and involved infrastructures such as the case of the Moscow gas pipeline explosion (9th May 2009), attacks to civil and military targets in Libya during operation “Odyssey Dawn” and 2011 civil war as well as several cases of Iraqi pipeline sabotages. In detecting such sabotages, RST applied to MSG-SEVIRI data not only demonstrated its capabilities in detecting accidents without false alarms in areas (like Iraq) hosting many refineries, but also in giving “precise information” about event time occurrence and, sometimes, even in “correcting” ground reports. In this paper some examples will be shown.