Fires in Greece

Severe fires swept through many areas of Greece during the summer of 2007, burning 2700 km² of forest and farmland and causing 87 deaths.

In response to the request from the Department of Emergency Planning and Response of the Greek Civil Protection concerning the severe fire events that affected their territory since 21 August, the European Space Agency (ESA) has taken the responsibility of the Charter Project Management, and, in collaboration with the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (the French Space Agency, CNES), have organised a team of value adding organisations to deliver crisis mapping products. This group is based on Greek, French and German partners; for instance, the Institute for Space Applications and Remote Sensing of the National Observatory of Athens, under contract to ESA within the RISK-EOS GMES Service Element project; SERTIT, with support from CNES; the German DLR ZKI organisation, another partner of RISK-EOS.

A series of EO based crisis/damage mapping products have been generated using a variety of Earth Observation sensors, such as, in the early phase of activation, Medium Resolution Optical data from ENVISAT MERIS, DMC (incl. Nigeriasat-1), Landsat, SAC-C, SPOT and FORMOSAT.