A Feasibility Study on the Application of TVDI on Accessing Wildfire Danger in the Korean Peninsula

Abstract

Wildfire is a major natural disaster affecting socioeconomics and ecology. Remote sensing data have been widely used to estimate the wildfire danger with an advantage of higher spatial resolution. Among the several wildfire related indices using remote sensing data, Temperature Vegetation Dryness Index (TVDI) assesses wildfire danger based on both Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Land Surface Temperature (LST). Although TVDI has physical advantages by considering both weather and vegetation condition, previous studies have shown TVDI does not performed well compare to other wildfire related indices over the Korean Peninsula. In this study we have attempted multiple modification to improve TVDI performance over the study region. In-situ measured air temperature was employed to increase accuracy, regression line was generated using monthly data to include seasonal effect, and TVDI was calculated at each province level to consider vegetation type and local climate. The modified TVDI calculation method was evaluated in wildfire cases and showed significant improvement in wildfire danger estimation

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