Estimation of Byram’s Fire Intensity and Rate of Spread from Spaceborne Remote Sensing Data in a Savanna Landscape

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The approach to estimating Byram’s fireline intensity and the rate of fire spread from satellite remote sensing observations was discussed. It is interesting and worthy of research. My comments are as follows.

1. The article uses a lot of phrase abbreviations, which makes it a bit difficult to follow. Although the author tried to explain the meaning of the abbreviations in the text as much as possible, some abbreviations have appeared before the explanation. A Nomenclature containing all the abbreviations would be very nice.
2. The introduction spent a lot of energy discussing the features of different remote sensors. A table summarizing all this important information would be very helpful for the readers to understand.
3. It mentioned ‘Missing observations (e. g. due to cloud or low fire activity) were also linearly interpolated.’ Is that reasonable? The possible error should be discussed.
4. Is such the result of Rate of Spread (Fig.2) reasonable since the highest resolution of the sensor is 20m, but the ROC < 20m/min?
5. The discussion should be shortened

Author Response

Please see attachment for response.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper presents a satellite-based approach to estimate Byram's fireline intensity, which has previously done with infrared imagery but not necessarily satellite imagery. The paper is excellently written. Only minor revisions are needed before it can be accepted for publication.

Specific comments:

Lines 35-36: As Byram's fireline intensity is "the most commonly used single parameter describing fire behavior in the wildfire community" more than two citations are needed. Please include citations to how it is used currently in wildland fire monitoring and response.

Lines 333-334: It would be good to have in the methods a table of all Sentinel-2 images used in this analysis from mid-November until the end of December. Having this in the results is a bit confusing.

Lines 334-335: Please provide a citation for the dates that span early and high fire season in Northern Côte D’Ivoire.

Figures: Do the three panels in Figures 2 - 7 correspond with the fires in Figure 1? If so, please update the figure captions for Figure 2 - 7 to make this clearer. Is the color schema in Figures 2 and 5 color-blond safe? Might be nice to check because they are really great illustrations that could be larger and easier to read.

Data availability: Will the coding be made available? And if proprietary, can that be noted here?

Author Response

Please see attachment for our response.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx