• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.6_1
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• pp.1299-1308
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• 2023

Forest fires are becoming more frequent and larger around the world due to climate change. Remote sensing such as satellite images can be used as an alternative or assistance data because it reduces various difficulties of field survey. Forest burn severity (differenced normalized burn ratio, dNBR) is calculated through the difference in normalized burn ratio (NBR) before and after a forest fire. The images used in the NBR formula are based on Landsat's near-infrared (NIR) and short-wavelength infrared (SWIR) bands. South Korea's satellite images don't have a SWIR band. So domestic studies related to forest burn severity calculated dNBR using overseas images or indirectly using the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) using South Korea's satellite images. Therefore, in this study, dNBR was calculated by substituting the mid-wavelength infrared (MWIR) band of Kompsat-3A (K3A) instead of the SWIR band in the NBR formula. The results were compared with the dNBR results obtained through Landsat which is the standard for dNBR formula. As a result, it was shown that dNBR using K3A's MWIR band has a wider range of values and can be expressed in more detail than dNBR using Landsat's SWIR band. Therefore, it is considered that K3A images will be highly useful in surveying burn areas and severity affected by forest fires. In addition, this study used the K3A's MWIR band images degraded to 30 m. It is considered that much better results will be obtained if a higher-resolution MWIR band is used.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.35 no.4
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• pp.517-534
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• 2019

In abrupt fire disturbances, high quality images suitable for wildfire damage assessment can be difficult to acquire. Quantifying wildfire burn area and severity are essential measures for quick short-term disaster response and efficient long-term disaster restoration. Planetscope (PS) imagery offers 3 m spatial and daily temporal resolution, which can overcome the spatio-temporal resolution tradeoff of conventional satellites, albeit at the cost of spectral resolution. This study investigated the potential of augmenting PS imagery by integrating the spectral information from Sentinel-2 (S2) differenced Normalized Burn Ratio (dNBR) to PS differenced Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (dNDVI) using histogram matching,specifically for wildfire burn area and severity assessment of the Okgye wildfire which occurred on April 4th, 2019. Due to the difficulty in acquiring reference data, the results of the study were compared to the wildfire burn area reported by Ministry of the Interior and Safety. The burn area estimates from this study demonstrated that the histogram-matched (HM) PS dNDVI image produced more accurate burn area estimates and more descriptive burn severity intervals in contrast to conventional methods using S2. The HM PS dNDVI image returned an error of only 0.691% whereas the S2 dNDVI and dNBR images overestimated the wildfire burn area by 5.32% and 106%, respectively. These improvements using PS were largely due to the higher spatial resolution, allowing for the detection of sparsely distributed patches of land and narrow roads, which were indistinguishable using S2 dNBR. In addition, the integration of spectral information from S2 in the PS image resolved saturation effects in areas of low and high burn severity.

• Journal of the Korean Association of Geographic Information Studies
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.80-92
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• 2007

Forest fire is the dominant large-scale disturbance mechanism in the Korean temperate forest, and it strongly influences forest structure and function. Moreover burn severity incorporates both short- and long-term post-fire effects on the local and regional environment. Burn severity is defined by the degree to which an ecosystem has changed owing to the fire. Vegetation rehabilitation may specifically vary according to burn severity after fire. To understand burn severity and process of vegetation rehabilitation at the damaged area after large-fire is required a lot of man powers and budgets. However the analysis of burn severity in the forest area using satellite imagery can acquire rapidly information and more objective results remotely in the large-fire area. Space and airbone sensors have been used to map area burned, assess characteristics of active fires, and characterize post-fire ecological effects. For classifying fire damaged area and analyzing burn severity of Samcheok fire area occurred in 2000, Cheongyang fire in 2002, and Yangyang fire in 2005 we utilized Normalized Burn Ratio(NBR) technique. The NBR is temporally differenced between pre- and post-fire datasets to determine the extent and degree of change detected from burning. In this paper we use pre- and post-fire imagery from the Landsat TM and ETM+ imagery to compute the NBR and evaluate large-scale patterns of burn severity at 30m spatial resolution. 65% in the Samcheok fire area, 91% in the Cheongyang fire area and 65% in the Yangyang fire area were corresponded to burn severity class above 'High'. Therefore the use of a remotely sensed Differenced Normalized Burn Ratio(${\Delta}NBR$) by RS and GIS allows for the burn severity to be quantified spatially by mapping damaged domain and burn severity across large-fire area.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.38 no.5_2
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• pp.765-779
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• 2022

This study evaluates the accuracy in identifying the burned area in South Korea using multi-temporal data from Sentinel-2 MSI and Landsat 8/9 OLI. Spectral indices such as the Difference Normalized Burn Ratio (dNBR), Relative Difference Normalized Burn Ratio (RdNBR), and Burned Area Index (BAI) were used to identify the burned area in the March 2022 forest fire in Uljin. Based on the results of six indices, the accuracy to detect the burned area was assessed for four satellites using Sentinel-2 and Landsat 8/9, respectively. Sentinel-2 and Landsat 8/9 produce images every 16 and 10 days, respectively, although it is difficult to acquire clear images due to clouds. Furthermore, using images taken before and after a forest fire to examine the burned area results in a rapid shift because vegetation growth in South Korea began in April, making it difficult to detect. Because Sentinel-2 and Landsat 8/9 images from February to May are based on the same date, this study is able to compare the indices with a relatively high detection accuracy and gets over the temporal resolution limitation. The results of this study are expected to be applied in the development of new indices to detect burned areas and indices that are optimized to detect South Korean forest fires.

• Journal of The Geomorphological Association of Korea
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.83-99
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• 2021

Burn severity analysis using satellite imagery has high capabilities for research and management in inaccessible areas. We extracted the forest fire area of the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) in the western Imjin Estuary which is restricted to access due to the confrontation between South and North Korea. Then we analyzed the forest fire severity and recoverability using atmospheric corrected Surface Reflectance Level-2 data collected from Landsat-8 OLI (Operational Land Imagery) / TIRS (Thermal Infrared Sensor). Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR), differenced NBR (dNBR), and Relative dNBR (RdNBR) were analyzed based on changes in the spectral pattern of satellite images to estimate burn severity area and intensity. Also, we evaluated the recoverability after a forest fire using a land cover map which is constructed from the NBR, dNBR, and RdNBR analyzed results. The results of dNBR and RdNBR analysis for the six years (during May 30, 2014 - May 30, 2020) showed that the intensity of monthly burn severity was affected by seasonal changes after the outbreak and the intensity of annual burn severity gradually decreased after the fire events. The regrowth of vegetation was detected in most of the affected areas for three years (until May 2020) after the forest fire reoccurred in May 2017. The monthly recoverability (from April 2014 to December 2015) of forests and grass fields was increased and decreased per month depending on the vegetation growth rate of each season. In the case of annual recoverability, the growth of forest and grass field was reset caused by the recurrence of a forest fire in 2017, then gradually recovered with grass fields from 2017 to 2020. We confirmed that remote sensing was effectively applied to research of the burn severity and recoverability in the DMZ. This study would also provide implications for the management and construction statistics database of the forest fire in the DMZ.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.35 no.6_2
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• pp.1107-1115
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• 2019

Satellite data play a major role in supporting knowledge about forest fire by delivering rapid information to map areas damaged. This study, we used 7 Sentinel-2A images to detect change area in forests of Sokcho on April 4, 2019. The process of classify forest fire severity used 7 levels from Sentinel-2A dNBR(differenced Normalized Burn Ratio). In the process of classifying forest fire damage areas, the study selected three areas with high regrowth of vegetation level and conducted a detailed spatial analysis of the areas concerned. The results of dNBR analysis, regrowth of coniferous forest was greater than broad-leaf forest, but NDVI showed the lowest level of vegetation. This is the error of dNBR classification of dNBR. The results of dNBR time series, an area of forest fire damage decreased to a large extent between April 20th and May 3rd. This is an example of the regrowth by developing rare-plants and recovering broad-leaf plants vegetation. The results showed that change area was detected through the change detection of danage area by forest category and the classification errors of the coniferous forest were reached through the comparison of NDVI and dNBR. Therefore, the need to improve the precision Korean forest fire damage rating table accompanied by field investigations was suggested during the image classification process through dNBR.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.35 no.6_4
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• pp.1341-1350
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• 2019

This research deals with algorithm for forest fire severity classification using multi-temporal KOMPSAT-3A image to mapping forest fire areas. The recent satellite of the KOMPSAT series, KOMPSAT-3A, demonstrates high resolution and multi-spectral imagery with infrared and high resolution electro-optical bands. However, there is a lack of research to classify forest fire severity using KOMPSAT-3A. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to analyze forest fire severity using KOMPSAT-3A images. In addition, this research used pre-fire and post-fire Sentinel-2 with differenced Normalized Burn Ratio (dNBR) to taking for burn severity distribution map. To test the effectiveness of the proposed procedure on April 4, 2019, Gangneung wildfires were considered as a case study. This research used the probability density function for the classification of forest fire damage severity based on R software, a free software environment of statistical computing and graphics. The burn severities were estimated by changing NDVI before and after forest fire. Furthermore, standard deviation of probability density function was used to calculate the size of each class interval. A total of five distribution of forest fire severity were effectively classified.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.37 no.5_3
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• pp.1373-1387
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• 2021

Forest fire poses a significant threat to the environment and society, affecting carbon cycle and surface energy balance, and resulting in socioeconomic losses. Widely used multi-spectral satellite image-based approaches for burned area detection have a problem in that they do not work under cloudy conditions. Therefore, in this study, Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data from Europe Space Agency, which can be collected in all weather conditions, were used to identify forest fire damaged area based on a series of processes including Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and K-means clustering. Four forest fire cases, which occurred in Gangneung·Donghae and Goseong·Sokcho in Gangwon-do of South Korea and two areas in North Korea on April 4, 2019, were examined. The estimated burned areas were evaluated using fire reference data provided by the National Institute of Forest Science (NIFOS) for two forest fire cases in South Korea, and differenced normalized burn ratio (dNBR) for all four cases. The average accuracy using the NIFOS reference data was 86% for the Gangneung·Donghae and Goseong·Sokcho fires. Evaluation using dNBR showed an average accuracy of 84% for all four forest fire cases. It was also confirmed that the stronger the burned intensity, the higher detection the accuracy, and vice versa. Given the advantage of SAR remote sensing, the proposed statistical processing and K-means clustering-based approach can be used to quickly identify forest fire damaged area across the Korean Peninsula, where a cloud cover rate is high and small-scale forest fires frequently occur.