High Temperature Fire Experiment for TET and LANDSAT 8 in Test Site DEMMIN (Germany)

In 2012, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) launched the small satellite TET-1 (Experimental Technology Carrier) as a test platform for new satellite technologies and as a carrier for the Multi-Spectral Camera System (MSC) with five spectral bands (Green, Red, Near Infrared, Middle Infrared, and Thermal Infrared). The MSC has been designed to provide quantitative parameters (e.g. fire radiative power, burned area) observing high-temperature events. The detection of such events provides information for operational support to fire brigades, to change detection of hotspots, to assess CO2 emissions of burning vegetation, and, finally, contributes to the monitoring programs that support climate models. In order to investigate the sensitivity and accuracy of the MSC system, a calibration and validation fire campaign was developed and executed, to derive characteristic signal changes of corresponding pixels in the MWIR and LWIR bands. The planning and execution of the validation campaign and the results are presented