In this ‘year of fire’ a joint UK and Canadian team are currently flying imaging surveys above the boreal wildfires of Northern Ontario, to learn more about their behaviour and to evaluate the performance of algorithms being designed to monitor fires from the infrared data collected by Earth orbiting satellites. The campaign is being led by Professor Martin Wooster of King’s College London and NERC’s National Centre for Earth Observation (NCEO), who travelled to Canada with researcher Dr Kari Hyll who has worked extensively on the methods used to analyse the IR data. Dr Weidong Xu, who is working on the Sentinel-3 data analysis, is supporting the team from London to provide regular updates of what the satellite can see. Continue reading “Monitoring wildfires from the air in Canada”