The use of AVHRR data to determine the concentration of visible and invisible tropospheric pollutants originating from a 1997 forest fire in Southeast Asia

Abstract

A massive forest fire in Indonesia in 1997 affected the whole Asian region by producing a large smoke plume, with Malaysia bearing the brunt due to the wind direction and weather conditions and because of its proximity to the source. The five primary fire produced pollutants were carbon monoxide (CO), sulphur dioxide (SO 2 ), nitrogen dioxide (NO 2 ), ozone (O 3 ) and particulate matter less than 10 mm (PM10). The first four of these are, of course, invisible to conventional satellite-flown multispectral scanners operating in the visible and near infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. The fifth, PM10, is present in the haze and therefore makes an observable contribution to the signal received by the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR). The haze in AVHRR channels 1 and 2 data for the fires of September 1997 has been used to study the concentration of PM10 directly. It has also been used to study the concentration indirectly-as a tracer or surrogate-for the four remaining materials, the gases CO, SO 2 , NO 2 and O 3 . Data from ground observations have been used to calibrate the results and the distributions of the fire pollutants over Peninsular Malaysia have been plotted.

Observing and understanding the Southeast Asian aerosol system by remote sensing: An initial review and analysis for the Seven Southeast Asian Studies (7SEAS) program

“…These dark target data sets represent in general different perturbations of the basic methodology. We fully acknowledge that many other algorithms exist and are applied to the region; these include for AVHRR, the Global Aerosol Climatology Project (GACP) product of Mishchenko et al (1999), the Indian AVHRR products of Hashim et al (2004) and Parameswaran et al (2004), and a large collection of ocean sensor products as outlined by Myhre et al (2004Myhre et al ( , 2005a. There has been sporadic use of geostationary data as well (e.g., Janjai and Wattan, 2011).…”

Remote sensing retrievals from SPOT measurements of aerosol over Penang Island, Malaysia

“…They affect the Earth's climate both directly (by scattering and absorbing radiation) and indirectly (by serving as nuclei for cloud formation). They provide sites for surface chemistry and condensed-phase chemistry to take place in the atmosphere (Hashim, et al, (2004) and Jacob, 1999). Scattering of solar radiation by gases and atmospheric particulates can limit human visibility in the troposphere; this is the phenomenon known as haze (Hashim, et al, 2004).…”

“…They provide sites for surface chemistry and condensed-phase chemistry to take place in the atmosphere (Hashim, et al, (2004) and Jacob, 1999). Scattering of solar radiation by gases and atmospheric particulates can limit human visibility in the troposphere; this is the phenomenon known as haze (Hashim, et al, 2004). Although accurate measurements of air quality parameters can be obtained with a conventional measuring technique, such a survey is time consuming and expensive.…”

Application of the multifractal microcanonical formalism to the detection of fire plumes in NOAA–AVHRR data

“…In several studies satellite remote sensing acquisitions have been used for the detection of fire accidents, the determination of plumes, and the analysis of emitted aerosols for the quantification of gaseous smoke expelled in forest or industrial fire incidents (Cahoon et al, 1999;Chrysoulakis and Cartalis, 2003;Chrysoulakis and Opie, 2004;Chu et al, 1998;Li et al, 2001;Flasse and Ceccato, 1996;Hashim et al, 2004). Most fire detection and plume determination algorithms are basically pixelbased: they use the grey-level values of pixels corresponding to a satellite acquisition over an extended ground area; depending on the physical properties of the acquired radiations, they determine appropriate threshold values and classify the pixels accordingly.…”