Unsupervised Wildfire Detection Using Multispectral MTG-FCI Data: A Feasibility Study

The launch of the Flexible Combined Imager (FCI) sensor aboard the Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) satellite enables higher temporal and spatial resolution for geostationary environmental monitoring. This study explores the feasibility of near-real-time fire detection using MTG-FCI data. Two unsupervised approaches are evaluated on data covering the Italian territory: a conventional threshold method, applying fixed radiometric thresholds and brightness temperature differences between 3.8 μm and 10.5 μm, and an experimental Lightweight U-Net autoencoder for anomaly detection. The autoencoder is trained exclusively on fire-free imagery, with fires identified as statistical anomalies in the reconstruction error, refined through local and global z-score analysis. Validation combines high-resolution Sentinel-2 imagery, Fire Radiative Power (FRP) and data from European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS). Results demonstrate that MTG-FCI can trigger active fire alerts prior to polar overpasses in 67.32% of the synchronized cases, providing a median early detection lead time of 21.00 min and reaching an advance of up to approximately 6 h in exceptional instances. While the spatial resolution limits detailed fire-front mapping, the high temporal resolution enables a robust near-real-time alerting system, providing enhanced detection of transient fire events that are not captured by lower-frequency polar-orbiting sensors.