A new burn severity index based on land surface temperature and enhanced vegetation index

Remotely sensed data have already become one of the major resources for estimating the burn severity of forest fires. Recently, Land Surface Temperature (LST) calculated from remote sensing data has been considered as a potential indicator for estimating burn severity. However, using the LET-based index alone may not be sufficient for estimating burn severity in the areas that has unburned trees and vegetation. In this paper, a new index is proposed by considering LST and enhanced vegetation index (EVI) together. The accuracy of the proposed index was evaluated by using 264 composite burn index (CBI) field sample data of the five fires across different regional eco-type areas in the Western United States. Results show that the proposed index performed equally well for post-fire areas covered with both sparse vegetation and dense vegetation and relatively better than some commonly-used burn severity indices. This index also has high potential of estimating burn severity if more accurate surface temperatures can be obtained in the future. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.