Release of Collection 2 of S3 NRT Fire Radiative Power

Photo credit: lassedesignen

Collection 2 of the Optimised Copernicus Sentinel-3 (CS3) NRT Level 2 (L2) fires product will be released on 9 December 2021, introducing daytime coverage in NRT Copernicus fires observation.

Last Updated

16 February 2023

Published on

25 November 2021

This product is generated by the 'Optimised Fire Radiative Power-Copernicus Sentinel-3' (OFRaP-CS3) processor upgraded to version 3.0.

OFRaP-CS3 provides Sentinel-3 fire observations intended to be assimilated in the future by the Global Fires Assimilation System (GFAS), together with the NASA MODIS (currently assimilated), VIIRS and other geostationary fires missions (future). It will help to support fire and aerosol pollution monitoring by the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS).

Collection 2 evolutions include:

The first version of daytime detection and FRP quantification over land surfaces from the 3.7 µm MWIR measurement, obtained by the creation of the virtual F3 fire channel.
Prevention of night-time false alarms caused by the F1 detector over-shooting through the so-called absolute detection test (both in Standard and Alternative FRP MWIR).

Note: Users are reminded to pay attention to the diversity of the scientific maturity and quality labels associated with the various fire types in the product. In particular the night-time (‘Preliminary Operational’) hotspots have a higher quality than those produced today during the day (‘Demonstrational’). Further detailed explanations are given in the Product Notice (PN), and users should consider them before using the product.

Figure 1: Day & night-time Sentinel-3 NRT Fires (Standard MWIR technique – Medium Clear-Sky class confidence) during the very intensive Wildfire summer 2021 season (02.08.2021): large-scale fires detected in Siberia, Canada, California, Amazonia, & Central-South Africa.

More information related to the Collection 2 can be found in:

OFRaP-CS3 Algorithm Theoretical Basis Document (ATBD), with co-contributions from Prof. Dr Martin Wooster & Dr Weidong Xu (King’s College London) (Coming soon)
OFRaP-CS3 Product Validation Report (PVR) (Coming soon).
Product Notice
Product Format Specification Document

Day-time MWIR fires detection from NRT Sentinel-3 (Standard MWIR) & MODIS Terra (all low-medium-high confidence) over Central Africa. — Figure 2: Daytime MWIR fires detection from NRT Sentinel-3 (Standard MWIR) and MODIS Terra (all low-medium-high confidence) over Central Africa. Note the small number of weak spots with NRT S3.

Feedback is welcomed and will be used in preparation of the future upgraded processing baselines. To provide feedback and for more information, contact our User Service Helpdesk.