Kangaroo Island Black Summer fire reconstruction

In the 2019-20 summer, wildfire affected an area of around 200,000 hectares on Kangaroo Island, South Australia, in what has become known as the Black Summer, with significant ongoing social, economic and environmental impacts.

The Advanced Himawari Imager (AHI) onboard the geostationary satellite Himawari-8 provides infrared imagery at 2km spatial resolution at nadir in 10- minute intervals. This allows wildfires to be detected and monitored in quasi-real time using the Biogeographical Region and Individual Geostationary HHMMSS Threshold (BRIGHT) algorithm (Engel, Jones and Reinke, 2020), developed in partnership between the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) and the Bushfire and Natural Hazard CRC. This report outlines the methods used to verify hotspots detected by the BRIGHT algorithm and reconstruct the Black Summer fires using spatio-temporal clustering.