Temporal Modelling for Burn Scars on Sentinel-3

Luca Barco, Edoardo Arnaudo, Andrea Bragagnolo, Claudio Rossi, Paolo Garza

Rapid and accurate burn scar delineation from satellite imagery is essential for post-fire damage assessment. Sentinel-3 OLCI, with daily revisit and 21 spectral bands, suits rapid mapping, yet most pipelines treat acquisitions independently, leaving the pre/post-fire change signal unexploited. We present a dataset of 246 wildfire activations (2016-2025) from the Copernicus Emergency Management Service, with Sentinel-3 OLCI temporally paired acquisitions. We benchmark spatial and temporal (ConvLSTM-augmented) variants of three backbones (U-Net, SegFormer, ConvNeXt-UPerNet) under two input modes and spectral configurations. Temporal modeling improves segmentation only when pre-fire frames are included, and a 5-band subset matches the full 21-band OLCI configuration.