Copernicus Sentinel-2 image of forest fires in northeastern Greece during August 2023
Planet Earth is ever changing, and these changes occur at a bewildering variety of scales and speeds. In this optical and shortwave infrared composite image, Copernicus Sentinel-2 captured the entirety of the 70 km fire front encroaching on the northeast port city of Alexandroupoli last summer. Copernicus satellite data helped guide the response of civil protection authorities, preventing a bad situation becoming even worse.
Copernicus provides services for a range of different applications such as early warnings of severe weather, air-quality forecasting, flood warnings, early detection of drought and desertification, oil-spill detection and drift prediction, sea-water quality, crop analysis, forest monitoring, land-use change, agriculture, food security and humanitarian aid – to name but a few.
Satellite images show the world through a wide-enough frame so that complete large-scale phenomena can be observed to an accuracy and entirety it would take an army of ground-level observers to match. A single picture has the potential to show the reach of a hurricane across a continent, the damage done in a region struck by an earthquake, or – as seen here – the pattern of wildfires and the thousands of hectares of burn scars left behind them.