Wildfire Management in Terms of Project Management of Sentinel Asia: Contributing to Mitigation of Global Warming by Reducing CO? Emission

Wildfires are occurring globally and causing a serious impact at both a regional and a global level, and accordingly bear a substantial influence on global warming. The fourth IPCC report on global warming in 2007 pointed out that a huge amount of CO₂ has been emitted from wildfires—6-15 gigaton in the world a year, while the total emitted CO₂ from fuel burning is 27 gigaton. This work is intended as an investigation of applications of remote sensing and Web-GIS technologies for monitoring, controlling, and managing wildfires. Sentinel Asia (SA) project to support disaster management in the Asia-Pacific region applying remote sensing and Web-GIS technologies was established in 2005, and the goal of SA wildfire control initiative is to establish an operational cycle that includes firefighters in each country in order to mitigate the damages caused by fires. The author has been in charge of SA project management, and the following works have been conducted: an evaluation method for hotspot detection algorithms, hotspot monitoring using geostationary satellite MTSAT, and a comprehensive approach for mitigation of global warming and its modeling using the AHP/ANP technique.

Kazuya Kaku received PhD from Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Hokkaido University, Japan. He belongs to Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and is currently working for Sentinel Asia project to support disaster management in the Asia-Pacific region, applying remote sensing and Web-GIS technologies.