Previna - Focos de calor (Beta

State Program for Prevention, Monitoring, Control of Burnings and Fighting Forest Fires - PREVINA

The second half of the year is the season with the highest incidence of forest fires and fires in the State of Ceará. The last months of the year, mainly October, November and December have the highest number of forest fires and fires due, in general, to favorable surface conditions (low soil and air humidity, dry vegetation, high soil and soil temperature). air, etc.) and thanks to the intensive use of burning in the preparation of land for agricultural crops. Forest fires, in turn, can come from uncontrolled burning or other causes.

State Program for Prevention, Monitoring, Control of Burnings and Fighting Forest Fires

The PREVINA Program, of the Government of Ceará, initiated in 2004, aims at the sustainable management of the state environment mainly with regard to its arable area in relation to the use of burning before the cultivation of the land and the occurrence of forest fires, leading to the adoption of less degrading and more conservationist alternatives than burning and the prevention and fight against forest fires.

PREVINA consists of a State Committee coordinated by the Environment Policy and Management Council - CONPAM, an Executive Secretariat exercised by the State Environment Superintendence - SEMACE, a Management Committee composed of several members, and a Situation Room, at FUNCEME, responsible for monitoring, by meteorological satellites, hot spots that may represent possible forest fires or fires throughout the territory of Ceará, and the meteorological conditions on the surface that facilitate the occurrence and spread of fire in vegetation . PREVINA also counts on the help of important partners such as the Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Natural Resources (IBAMA) and the Fire Department, among others.

FUNCEME started to generate, experimentally, images of hot spots using NOAA series satellites from the end of 2005 (see example). Until then, she had not yet worked with this type of information. In the following year, the generation of this information occurred almost daily, but still in the testing phase. Unfortunately, as of 2007, the reception of images and data from NOAA satellites at FUNCEME started to present technical problems, making monitoring difficult. However, FUNCEME restarts, this year, the reception and NOAA processing, and works on developing the detection of hot spots from the Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) satellite and improving the information generated by it.

Using its own reception and processing, FUNCEME guarantees, in relation, for example, to NOAA series satellites, a better coverage of the Ceará territory, because sometimes this coverage made from reception stations further south of the country may not be complete . In addition, the spatial resolution of the image area covering Ceará may be slightly better at the local reception. It should be noted that in the information in which the word “several satellites” appears, this includes other satellites, but also NOAA series satellites.