FOREST FIRE DANGER ESTIMATION IN THE ITALIAN PENINSULA BASED ON THE INTEGRATION OF SATELLITE AVHRR DATA AND TOPOGRAPHIC FACTORS

The main objective of this work has been to evaluate the potential of integration of satellite data and topographic factor, in order to achieve improved performance in forest fire danger estimation. Existing AVHRR-based fire danger estimation methods (a review is specifically made) aim at obtaining fire susceptibility classification exploiting, mainly, the temporal evolution of NDVI, and Surface Temperature (T-s). In this work fire danger estimation has been performed integrating satellite data with fuel type and topographic factors. In order to evaluate the reliability; of the estimated indices, the time-space distribution of actual forest fires, provided by the Italian Forestry service, has been used. Preliminary results are very promising; they have shown that in the summer of 1996, a large number of forest fires occurred in the estimated higher danger areas.