Tag: remote sensing

A few days ago, I posted about a recent wildfire in Tres Cantos, Madrid, Spain, sharing images of Pléiades Neo and Sentinel-2 that showed the extent of the fire. Since the Sentinel-2 data products can be downloaded for free and they include multispectral data covering 13 bands including visible, near infrared and short wave infrared spectrum, I have decided to do an analysis of this data. There are two main goals to this. The first is to learn. I have never done this before. It is an interesting topic, and I mostly learn by doing. So bare with me that although all my results seem to make sense, I could have made some mistakes or done something in a suboptimal way.

The second is to understand how badly the holm oak woodland in “Monte de Viñuelas” has been burnt. In the previous post I explained that this is a 30 km² estate and that a large part of it has been hit by the fire. From the wall that borders the estate I can see that the oaks that are near the wall have not burnt, but the grass in the ground has burnt completely. The leaves on these oaks are mostly fine. Some of them might wither with time if the fire has killed the tree (in some previous smaller fires I have seen that if the fire has killed only part of the tree, just that part will wither). Here are some images published by a hunting journal showing how some of these areas look like a few days after the fire.

However, deeper into the woodlands there seems to be more damage and trees burnt completely. This is not so easy to see from the wall, and I cannot just walk in, as it is private land. Aerial photography would be best, but without it, satellite imagery is the next best thing. It is hard to tell how large the damage is from the visible spectrum imagery, but as we will see in this post, the infrared bands have much more information.

This post is going to be slightly unusual for the topics of this blog, because there is no RF, but nevertheless there is space-based remote sensing, which fits somewhat well with the things I usually write about. I wanted to write down this information somewhere, and it was too long for a series of tweets.

As some of you might have heard in the news, there has been a large wildfire in Tres Cantos, Madrid, Spain, which is the city where I live. This has even been featured in international news. First of all, I am okay, as are all the family and friends I have in the city. The fire broke out on 2025-08-11 17:45 UTC (19:45 local time) and by the next morning its perimeter was already contained. As of writing this post on the morning of 2025-08-13, the fire is almost put out and is considered to be controlled. We have been lucky that a fire so close to the city has caused relatively low damage. I am not keeping a tally, but what I heard is: one person’s life, a few houses in the borders of the city, as well as a few countryside houses and sheds, the King’s College British school, and the 17th century Viñuelas castle, as well as part of the castle grounds, which consist of 3000 hectares of holm oak woodland, commonly known as “Monte de Viñuelas”.

Since I woke up on the morning of 2025-08-12, I have been very interested in understanding which area has been affected by the fire. The information I could see in Google maps, and even in some news articles (which could have been based off Google maps) didn’t quite match what I had seen in pictures and videos shared in social media, as well as what I saw by driving on the streets bordering the town. An official map has not been published, as far as I know. So I have been keeping an eye on space-based imagery platforms to see when the first images taken on 2025-08-12 would pop up. I don’t use these services frequently, so this has also helped me get up to speed on the current constellations, platforms and services. This is the topic of this post.