Publications

Imperatore, P; Azar, R; Calo, F; Stroppiana, D; Brivio, PA; Lanari, R; Pepe, A (2017). Effect of the Vegetation Fire on Backscattering: An Investigation Based on Sentinel-1 Observations. IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN APPLIED EARTH OBSERVATIONS AND REMOTE SENSING, 10(10), 4478-4492.

Abstract
This paper aims at investigating the potential of Sentinel-1 C-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) observations for detecting fire scars in vegetated areas at regional scale. A comprehensive analysis of the backscattering coefficients is carried out. The experimental analysis is conducted by analyzing the scenario of the Sardinia Island, which is one of the Italian regions most affected by fire events over the summer season. The detection capability of fire scars in such an environment is demonstrated by exploiting information extracted from dual-polarized SAR data. Our results reveal a significant decrease of the VH response over the fire-disturbed forests, thus, highlighting the effectiveness of such cross-polarized observations. In order to prove the validity of the proposed approach for the detection of fire scars in the vegetation layer, the results of the conducted experiments have been suitably compared with burned areas identified by using an existing fuzzy-based algorithm, which has been applied to multispectral Landsat-8 operational land imager data. This investigation opens theway to systematic methods for monitoring fire scars in heterogeneous environments, and in particular in fire-prone Mediterranean ecosystems.

DOI:
10.1109/JSTARS.2017.2717039

ISSN:
1939-1404