Leveraging MTG-FCI fire observations for event-based fire behavior monitoring from near-real-time operation to seasonal analysis

Abstract

Wildfire monitoring and suppression require timely information on fire behavior, including fire energy release and rate of spread, to support operational decision-making and resource allocation. Active fire products from the Flexible Combined Imager (FCI) aboard the geostationary Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) satellites provide 10-min observations over Europe and Africa. Deriving fire behavior information from these observations requires associating individual hotspot detections into coherent fire events. We present a Fire Event Tracker (FET) algorithm that performs spatio-temporal clustering of hotspot detections from the LSA-SAF FCI active fire product. The algorithm assigns persistent identifiers to fire events and updates their geometry, fire radiative power, and rate of spread at each 10-min interval. The same parameterization is used for both near-real-time and retrospective processing. FET was applied retrospectively to the Mediterranean FCI hotspot archive of 2025 and operationally in two near-real-time contexts: wildfire monitoring in Portugal and support of the 2025 SILEX airborne campaign within the EUBURN project, where besides fire monitoring, FET products were also used to initialize coupled FOREFIRE-MesoNH simulations for plume forecasting. Results show that event-based clustering of FCI active fire detections provides a consistent description of fire evolution, enabling both tactical wildfire management and high-frequency seasonal fire analyses.