Development and analysis of a 12-year daily 1-km forest fire dataset across North America from NOAA/AVHRR data

Abstract

Fires in boreal and temperate forests play a significant role in the global carbon cycle. While forest fires in North America (NA) have been surveyed extensively by U.S. and Canadian forest services, most fire records are limited to seasonal statistics without information on temporal evolution and spatial expansion. Such dynamic information is crucial for modeling fire emissions. Using the daily Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) data archived from 1989 to 2000, an extensive and consistent fire product was developed across the entire NA forest regions on a daily basis at 1-km resolution. The product was generated following data calibration, geo-referencing, and the application of an active fire detection algorithm and a burned area mapping algorithm. The spatial-temporal variation of forest fire in NA is analyzed in terms of (1) annual and monthly patterns of fire occurrences in different eco-domains, (2) the influence of topographic factors (elevation zones, aspect classes, and slope classes), and (3) major forest types and eco-regions in NA. It was found that 1) among the 12 years analyzed, 1989 and 1995 were the most severe fire years in NA; 2) the majority of burning occurred during June-July and in low elevation zones (b 500 m) with gentle slopes (b 10°), except in the dry eco-domain where more fires occurred in higher elevation zones (N 2000 m); 3) most fires occurred in the polar ecodomain, sub-arctic eco-division, and in the taiga (boreal forests), forest-tundras and open woodlands eco-provinces in the boreal forests of Canada. The tendency for multiple burns to occur increases with elevation and slope until about 2500 m elevation and 24°slope, and decreases therefore. In comparison with ground observations, the omission and commission errors are on the order of 20%.

Current systematic carbon-cycle observations and the need for implementing a policy-relevant carbon observing system

“…The European Space Agency (ESA) World Fire Atlas (Arino and Plummer, 2001;Arino et al, 2012), provides another long continuous global record of active fires using the Along-Track Scanning Radiometer (ATSR) instrument, and has recently been upgraded using a new nighttime algorithm and extended back to 1991. Other polar orbiting satellites, such as Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (NOAA-AVHRR), Visible and Infrared Scanner (VIRS) on board the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), and geostationary satellites (Meteosat Second Generation (MSG); Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES)) extend these observations to better characterize the diurnal cycle of active fires (Pu et al, 2007;Ji and Stocker, 2002;Beaudoin et al, 2007). MODIS is currently the best polar orbiting sensor for this phenomenon, measuring both active fires and burned areas .…”

Modeling ozone plumes observed downwind of New York City over the North Atlantic Ocean during the ICARTT field campaign

“…The emission factors (fraction of emitted mass per biomass fuel mass burned) and combustion factors were calculated based on Andreae and Merlet (2001) and Ward et al (1992). The fire locations and burned area were obtained from a combination of three satellite data sets: the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-Wildfire Automated Biomass Burning Algorithm (GOES WF ABBA) fire product (Prins et al, 1998), the Moderate Resolution Imag- ing Spectroradiometer (MODIS) fire product (Giglio et al, 2003), and the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) fire product from NOAA polar-orbiting satellites (Pu et al, 2007). The calculated wildfire emissions were adjusted by matching to the CO emission amount estimated from a bottom-up fire emission inventory (Turquety et al, 2007).…”

Remote sensing of environmental change over China: A review

“…The detection and identification of LUCC are usually obtained through thresholding multitemporal differences of remotely sensed data or post classification comparison [12][13][14][15][16]. Most other types of changes can be quantitatively characterized.…”