Engineering: Floods and fires across Europe captured from space

 

The European Space Agency's (ESA) Envisat satellite has detected the worst of this summer’s weather through its sensor technology.

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ESA has highlighted the extreme weather conditions impacting Europe by capturing the worst floodwater to hit Britain in 60 years and the deadly fires sweeping through southern Europe.

Last week, heavy rains caused the River Thames to burst its banks, triggering the evacuation of hundreds of homes in the university city of Oxford.

The flooding across England and Wales left tens of thousands without electricity and water.

Flooding is estimated to be the world's most costly kind of natural disaster.

The flooding of June and July in the UK is expected to cost the insurance industry at least £2 billion, according to the Association of British Insurers (ABI).

Floods Minister John Healey said recovery and clean-up efforts could take a number of months.

Fire fighters in Europe battled some 1,500 blazes within a 24-hour period in parts of central and southern Italy over the weekend.

And on Tuesday, in Italy’s southern region of Puglia, thousands of tourists fled to beaches to escape a fast-burning fire and had to be rescued via boats and helicopters.

To help emergency services during the continent wide emergencies, aerial observation is paramount, but it is often very difficult to do due to the prohibitive weather conditions.

Increased use of Earth Observation

On 24 July, the UK’s Environment Agency requested the help of the International Charter on 'Space and Major Disasters', a joint initiative for providing emergency response satellite data free of charge to those affected by disasters anywhere in the world.

As the inundated areas are usually visible from space, Earth Observation (EO) is increasingly being used for flood response and mitigation, and in October 2000, the ESA and the French space agency (CNES) initiated the charter.

Major fires are also visible from space – satellites detect not only the smoke billowing from major conflagrations but also the burn scars left in their wake.

Even the fires themselves are detectable – appearing as 'hotspots' when scanning the Earth's surface in infrared wavelengths.

For a decade now, ESA satellites have been continuously surveying fires burning across the Earth’s surface.

Worldwide fire maps based on this data are now available to users online in near-real-time through ESA's World Fire Atlas (WFA).

WFA data are based on results from the Along Track Scanning Radiometer (ATSR) instrument onboard ESA’s ERS-2 satellite and the Advanced Along Track Scanning Radiometer (AATSR) onboard Envisat.

These twin radiometer sensors work like thermometers in the sky, measuring thermal infrared radiation to take the temperature of Earth's land surfaces. 

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