  As sadly known, forest fires are part of a set of natural disasters that have
always affected regions of the world typically characterized by a tropical
climate with long periods of drought. However, due to climate changes of the
recent years, other regions of our planet that were not affected by this plague
have also had to deal with this phenomenon. One of them is certainly the
Italian peninsula, and especially the regions of southern Italy. For this
reason, the scientific community, and in particular that one of the remote
sensing, plays an important role in the development of reliable techniques to
provide useful support to the competent authorities. Therefore, in this work,
the capability of the Normalized Differential Water Index (NDWI), derived from
spaceborne remote sensing (RS) data, is assessed to monitor the forest fires
occurred on a specific study area during the summer of 2017: the volcano
Vesuvius, near Naples (in Campania, Italy). In particular, the index is
obtained from Sentinel-2 multispectral images of the European Space Agency
(ESA), which are free of charge and open accessible. Moreover, the twin
Sentinel-2 (S-2) sensors allows to overcome some restrictions on time delivery
and high frequency observation. These requirements are goodly matched by other
spaceborne sensors, such as MODIS and VIIRS satellites, but at the expense of a
lower spatial resolution.
