Potential global fire monitoring from EOS‐MODIS

Abstract

Abstract. The National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) plans to launch the moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MEDIS) on the polarorbiting Earth Observation System (EeS) providing morning and evening global observations in 1999 and afternoon and night observations in 2000. These four MEDIS daily fire observations will advance global fire monitoring with special 1 km resolution fire channels at 4 and 11 /xm, with high saturation of about 450 and 400 K, respectively. MEDIS data will also be used to monitor burn scars, vegetation type and condition, smoke aerosols, water vapor, and clouds for overall monitoring of the fire process and its effects on ecosystems, the atmosphere, and the climate. The MEDIS fire science team is preparing algorithms that use the thermal signature to separate the fire signal from the background signal. A database of active fire products will be generated and archived at a 1 km resolution and summarized on a grid of 10 km and 0.5 ø, daily, 8 days, and monthly. It includes the fire occurrence and location, the rate of emission of thermal energy from the fire, and a rough estimate of the smoldering/flaming ratio. This information will be used in monitoring the spatial and temporal distribution of fires in different ecosystems, detecting changes in fire distribution and identifying new fire frontiers, wildfires, and changes in the frequency of the fires or their relative strength. We plan to combine the MEDIS fire measurements with a detailed diurnal cycle of the fires from geostationary satellites. Sensitivity studies and analyses of aircraft and satellite data from the Yellowstone wildfire of 1988 and prescribed fires in the Smoke, Clouds, and Radiation (SCAR) aircraft field experiments are used to evaluate and validate the fire algorithms and to establish the relationship between the fire thermal properties, the rate of biomass consumption, and the emissions of aerosol and trace gases from fires.

Automated volcanic eruption detection using MODIS

“…Adapted from Fig. 4 in Kaufman et al (1998). situation is complicated further when using daytime data due to the contribution that reflected sunlight makes to the 4-Am signal, which can result in anomalously reflective surfaces appearing ''hot'' in daytime 4-Am imagery.…”

“…Hybrids of the spectral and contextual approaches form the basis of several existing hotspot detection algorithms, such as the GOES automated biomass burning algorithm (ABBA; Prins & Menzel, 1994), the MODIS fire algorithm (Kaufman et al, 1998), and the HIGP GOES hotspot algorithm ). However, the constraints placed on the development of MODVOLC meant that we could not utilise either approach.…”

“…Scanning is achieved by 10 simultaneous 1-km strips (i.e. one strip per detector giving a 10-km footprint) or 20 and 40 strips for the 500-and 250-m resolution channels, respectively (Kaufman et al, 1998). Although the nominal MODIS pixel size at 4 and 11-12 Am is 1 km, a point heat source is likely to be represented by one or two across-track pixels.…”

“…However, in order to fully understand the rationale upon which the algorithm was designed, it is first necessary to outline the operational constraints that guided its development. MODVOLC had to be designed to run at an early stage in the MODIS data chain with no other data dependencies (Kaufman et al, 1998) and had to be simple enough so as not to impose a drain on the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) Distributed Active Archive Center's (DAAC) computer resources. The MODVOLC algorithm had to be a point operation (i.e.…”

Assessing Performance of the RSTVOLC Multi-Temporal Algorithm in Detecting Subtle Hot Spots at Oldoinyo Lengai (Tanzania, Africa) for Comparison with MODLEN

“…Figure 4 displays the temporal trend of the radiant flux (Q rad ) retrieved from RST VOLC detections performed on MODIS data of July-early September 2007 (similar results are expected from MODLEN outputs). We estimated the radiant flux using the formulation reported in Reference [55] (amending that proposed by Kaufman et al [56] to retrieve the rate of emitted energy of active fires):…”