The signal before the spark

No one wants to see the fire. By the time flame is visible, the decision window has already closed. The useful signal comes earlier — and it is measurable.

Heat, drought and summer storms are a given. Vegetation along the line can ignite — and the grid is often both the trigger and the victim. We can't rule fire out. But when the warning signs are caught early, the risk drops sharply, because the response can be targeted instead of blind.

What the satellite actually sees

The satellite isn't hunting for flames. It measures the water stress of vegetation along the corridor, week after week, across the entire grid. The index is NDWI — the Normalized Difference Water Index — derived from satellite bands. A healthy, well-watered canopy reads high; a stand that has dried out for good reads low. Those low-NDWI spans are the fire-prone ones, long before anything is visible from the ground.

One snapshot isn't the point. The multi-year time series is. By comparing today against the same span years back, the system flags where the condition has genuinely shifted — not where it has always been dry.

The climate trend, measured — not asserted

Behind the vegetation signal sits the weather that drives it. Using ERA5 reanalysis (the meteorological gold standard, 1940 to present) we count fire-weather days per year for each region, then test the trend.

That last point matters more than it looks. A tool that paints every region red is selling fear. A tool that says "no significant trend here" where the statistics say so is one you can trust with the regions where the trend is real.

What it gives the operator

You don't patrol the whole network. Continuous monitoring tells you where the risk has shifted, so the next move is precise.

Fewer hours spent blind. Faster response. Lower risk — and a defensible, data-backed record of why each decision was made.