Europe's free satellite service just made it easier to track wildfires

Users could previously add this script manually to Copernicus Browser sessions by copying and pasting it using the custom visualization option under the default layers.

But Simon Proud, mission scientist for Sentinel-2 at the European Space Agency, pushed to get the script integrated into Copernicus Browser as a default option. “This makes it much easier to visualize wildfires seen from space with just a few clicks of the mouse,” Proud wrote in a LinkedIn post.

There are other existing and emerging satellite constellations capable of detecting and monitoring wildfires and wildfire smoke. NASA’s FIRMS tool provides free access to a global map of fires detected by NASA satellite sensors and is rapidly updated within several hours—although such NASA satellite imagery is only available in coarser resolutions down to 250 meters.

By comparison, the Sentinel 2 satellite imagery is updated every few days but provides much higher resolution imagery in certain bands down to a 10-meter spatial resolution. That makes it arguably the best free and publicly available tool for delivering higher-resolution satellite imagery of everything from wildfires to war zones.

Unfortunately, there is no shortage of wildfires to keep an eye on across the world as climate change exacerbates traditional wildfire seasons. Much of Washington and Oregon are experiencing wildfires and smoke, Canada’s wildfire season is on track to be one of the country’s worst, and firefighters continue to battle blazes in France and Spain, where hundreds of thousands of people have evacuated during a record-breaking wildfire season.

This story was updated on August 10 to include a statement about the significance of this development from Simon Proud’s LinkedIn post.