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News  Floods and fires across Europe captured from space
Highlighting the extreme weather conditions hitting Europe, space sensors aboard ESA’s Envisat satellite have detected the worst floodwaters to hit Britain for 60 years and deadly fires raging through southern Europe. Heavy rains caused the River Thames to burst its banks on Wednesday, forcing the evacuation of hundreds of homes in Britain’s university city of Oxford. The flooding across England and Wales has left tens of thousands without electricity and water.
The Environment Agency still has three severe flood warnings in place – two on the Thames around Oxford and one on the Ock River near Oxfordshire. In areas where flooding is beginning to recede, sanitation officials are warning of health risks posed by stagnant waters.
One of the biggest problems during flooding emergencies is obtaining an overall view of the phenomenon, with a clear idea of the extent of the flooded area. Aerial observation is often very difficult due to prohibitive weather conditions and, if the phenomenon is widespread, would be very time-consuming and expensive.
Heat and fire
While Britain fights floods, southern European countries are battling blazes and searing temperatures that have surpassed 40 degrees Celsius, spawning fires in Greece, Italy and Macedonia.
Fire fighters battled some 1500 blazes within a 24-hour period in parts of central and southern Italy over the weekend. On Tuesday in Italy’s southern region of Puglia, thousands of tourists fled to beaches to escape a fast-burning fire and had to be rescued via boats and helicopters. Local media reports two elderly locals were killed trying to escape the flames.
Although searing temperatures and tinder dry conditions are to blame for some of the fires, on Wednesday Italian politicians and forestry officials blamed some on arsonists.
On Thursday some 200 fires were reported burning across Greece, where temperatures have been as high as 45 C, with more than a dozen burning out of control. Peloponnese and the island of Cephalonia in the Adriatic off the peninsula's northwest coast are among the worst hit areas.
For a decade now, ESA satellites have been continuously surveying fires burning across the Earth’s surface. Worldwide fire maps based on this data are now available to users online in near-real time through ESA's ATSR World Fire Atlas (WFA).
The WFA data are based on results from the Along Track Scanning Radiometer (ATSR) instrument onboard ESA’s ERS-2 satellite and the Advanced Along Track Scanning Radiometer (AATSR) onboard Envisat. These twin radiometer sensors work like thermometers in the sky, measuring thermal infrared radiation to take the temperature of Earth's land surfaces.
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