Improvement of dNBR burnt areas detection procedure by physical considerations based on NDVI index

The detection and mapping of burned areas have been long studied and several algorithms have been developed, such as that used in the dNBR (differential Normalized Burn Ratio) method. This work aims at evaluating the performance of the dNBR as regards to both the positively detected burnt areas and the false alarms, when applied in a Mediterranean region. The dependence of the dNBR method efficiency from the adopted threshold is assessed, and the performances in terms of omission and commission errors are evaluated in mapping and detection tasks. A new enhanced version of the dNBR method based on the introduction of four simple environmental conditional tests is then presented and the related results are comparatively reported.