Delineating land/forest fire burnt scars with ERS interferometric synthetic aperture radar

Cloud-penetrating C-band synthetic aperture radar imagery acquired during t wo ERS-1/2 tandem missions (April 1996 and October 1997) was used in mappin g burnt areas in South Kalimantan, Indonesia, during the 1997 Southeast Asi a forest fire episode. Vegetated areas were classified by their low interfe rometric coherence in both the 1996 and 1997 imagery while the burnt areas were delineated by their increased coherence in 1997. A total of 552 kha of land was found to be burnt scars out of the 3.6 Mha area surveyed. The res ults were validated using a multispectral SPOT image of the area acquired i n September 1997.