A small grass fire burned in the night of 28 April 2024 on the island of Vågsøy, which lies circa 80 km southwest of the town of Ålesund. The fire burned in very steep and inaccessible terrain, which made fighting the fire challenging. Nonetheless, the firefighters were available to extinguish the fire within ca. 6 hours. in the course of the night. Despite the small size of the fire, its impacts were visible from space. The SPARKS burned area algorithm based on data from the Sentinel-2/MSI instrument estimated a total burned area of approximately 12.3 hectares. More information about the fire can be found here (in Norwegian).

Estimating burned area from Sentinel-2/MSI data for fire on Vågsøy. False-color image before the fire (top left), false color image after the fire (top center), difference in normalized burn ratio (top right and bottom left), binary mask of the burned area determined from the difference in normalized burn ratio (bottom center), and vectorized polygon of the burned area derived from the binary mask (bottom right).
Topographic map of the region with the burned area estimated from Sentinel-2/MSI overlaid in blue. Topo map ©Kartverket under CC BY 4.0.

Published by philipp