In recent years, the Alps and other mountainous regions in Europe became increasingly affected by forest fires. Fires are a major threat for mountain forests and their services for economy, tourism, health, water quality and natural hazards protection. Current forecasts of forest fire danger have too coarse resolutions, are solely based on weather information and do not consider actual surface moisture and vegetation conditions. CONFIRM aims to integrate high-resolution Copernicus Sentinel 1 and 2 observations on surface moisture and vegetation conditions with LiDAR data, fire weather forecasts, socioeconomic information, topographic data and a forest fire database to develop a novel, high-resolution and satellite-supported integrated forest fire danger system (IFDS) for Austria and neighbouring regions. We will exploit novel satellite retrievals and state-of-the art machine-learning methods to develop daily reanalyses and forecasts of forest fire ignition and spread risks according to the requirements of meteorological agencies, fire fighters, foresters and infrastructure providers.
