Thermal Remote Sensing of Active Vegetation Fires and Biomass Burning Events

Wooster, Martin J.; Roberts, G.; Smith, Alistair M. S.; Johnston, Joshua M.; Freeborn, Patrick H.; Amici, S.; Hudak, Andrew T.

doi:10.1007/978-94-007-6639-6_18

Cited by 39 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 115 publications

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“…Prins et al, 1998) allows SEVIRI in theory to detect actively burning fires covering as little as 10 −4 of a pixel Wooster et al, 2013). However, the FTA algorithm must take care to prevent sunglint and other potentially confounding features being falsely identified as active fires, and this requires use of data from other SEVIRI spectral channels (Sect.…”

Section: Active Fire Data From the Msg Satellite Seriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

LSA SAF Meteosat FRP products – Part 1: Algorithms, product contents, and analysis

et al. 2015

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Abstract. Characterizing changes in landscape fire activity at better than hourly temporal resolution is achievable using thermal observations of actively burning fires made from geostationary Earth Observation (EO) satellites. Over the last decade or more, a series of research and/or operational "active fire" products have been developed from geostationary EO data, often with the aim of supporting biomass burning fuel consumption and trace gas and aerosol emission calculations. Such Fire Radiative Power (FRP) products are generated operationally from Meteosat by the Land Surface Analysis Satellite Applications Facility (LSA SAF) and are available freely every 15 min in both near-real-time and archived form. These products map the location of actively burning fires and characterize their rates of thermal radiative energy release (FRP), which is believed proportional to rates of biomass consumption and smoke emission. The FRP-PIXEL product contains the full spatio-temporal resolution FRP data set derivable from the SEVIRI (Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager) imager onboard Meteosat at a 3 km spatial sampling distance (decreasing away from the west African sub-satellite point), whilst the FRP-GRID product is an hourly summary at 5 • grid resolution that includes simple bias adjustments for meteorological cloud cover and regional underestimation of FRP caused primarily by underdetection of low FRP fires. Here we describe the enhanced geostationary Fire Thermal Anomaly (FTA) detection algorithm used to deliver these products and detail the methods used to generate the atmospherically corrected FRP and perpixel uncertainty metrics. Using SEVIRI scene simulations and real SEVIRI data, including from a period of Meteosat-8 "special operations", we describe certain sensor and data preprocessing characteristics that influence SEVIRI's active fire detection and FRP measurement capability, and use these to specify parameters in the FTA algorithm and to make recommendations for the forthcoming Meteosat Third Generation operations in relation to active fire measures. We show that the current SEVIRI FTA algorithm is able to discriminate actively burning fires covering down to 10 −4 of a pixel and that it appears more sensitive to fire than other algorithms used to generate many widely exploited active fire products. Finally, we briefly illustrate the information contained within the current Meteosat FRP-PIXEL and FRP-GRID products, providing example analyses for both individual fires and multi-year regional-scale fire activity; the companion paper (Roberts et al., 2015) provides a full product performance evaluation and a demonstration of product use within components of the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS).

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Section: Active Fire Data From the Msg Satellite Seriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

LSA SAF Meteosat FRP products – Part 1: Algorithms, product contents, and analysis

et al. 2015

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“…The MODIS instruments on board NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites together collect between four and six images per day of ground locations across CONUS [ Kaufman et al ., ]. The visible, near‐infrared, and shortwave infrared channels are sensitive to changes in surface spectral reflectance caused by the passage of a fire front [ Giglio et al ., ], and the midwave and longwave infrared channels are sensitive to the thermal radiation emitted during combustion [ Wooster et al ., ]. The MODIS direct broadcast (DB) burned area mapping algorithm identifies the day of burning at ~500 m resolution by inspecting a time series of vegetation indexes calculated from 1.2 µm and 2.1 µm surface reflectance measurements [ Giglio et al ., , ].…”

Section: Data Setsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impacts of changing fire weather conditions on reconstructed trends in U.S. wildland fire activity from 1979 to 2014

2016

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One component of climate‐fire interactions is the relationship between weather conditions concurrent with burning (i.e., fire danger) and the magnitude of fire activity. Here daily environmental conditions are associated with daily observations of fire activity within ecoregions across the continental United States (CONUS) by aligning the latter 12 years of a 36 year gridded fire danger climatology with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer fire products. Results reveal that although modern relationships (2003–2014) vary regionally, fires across the majority of CONUS are more likely to be present and burning more vigorously as fire danger increases. Applying modern relationships to the entire climatology (1979–2014) indicates that in the absence of other influences, changes in fire danger have significantly increased the number of days per year that fires are burning across 42–49% of CONUS (by area) while also significantly increasing daily fire growth and daily heat release across 37–45% of CONUS. Increases in the fire activity season length coupled with an intensification of daily burning characteristics resulted in a CONUS‐wide +0.02 Mha yr−1 trend in burned area, a 10.6 g m−2 yr−1 trend in the amount of fuel consumed per unit burned area, and ultimately a +0.51 Tg yr−1 trend in dry matter consumption. Overall, the results demonstrate regional variations in the response of fires to changes in fire danger and that weather conditions concurrent with burning have a three‐pronged impact on the magnitude of fire activity by affecting the seasonal duration, spatial extent, and combustion intensity.

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“…If the broadband radiometers in the FBP and AES have a uniform spectral response and have been calibrated, then the conversion between the raw sensor signal and the spectrally integrated radiant heat flux over all wavelengths is a relatively straightforward procedure. In contrast, many narrow-band radiometers and most thermal imaging systems operate in specific atmospheric windows either between 3-5 µm (MIR) or 8-14 µm (LWIR) [47]. Although from a practical standpoint these atmospheric windows permit much of the fire emitted radiance to reach the sensor unattenuated, the challenges of estimating the spectrally integrated radiant heat flux from a spectral brightness temperature measurement has inspired the development of several novel approaches, namely, the emissivity-area product [44,48], a semi-empirical approach based on simulated sub-pixel thermal distributions [27], and the MIR radiance method [25].…”

Section: Fire Radiant Heat Fluxmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Cooney Ridge Fire Experiment: An Early Operation to Relate Pre-, Active, and Post-Fire Field and Remotely Sensed Measurements

Hudak

Freeborn

Lewis

et al. 2018

Fire

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Abstract:The Cooney Ridge Fire Experiment conducted by fire scientists in 2003 was a burnout operation supported by a fire suppression crew on the active Cooney Ridge wildfire incident. The fire experiment included measurements of pre-fire fuels, active fire behavior, and immediate post-fire effects. Heat flux measurements collected at multiple scales with multiple ground and remote sensors illustrate the spatial and temporal complexity of the fire progression in relation to fuels and fire effects. We demonstrate how calculating cumulative heat release can provide a physically based estimate of fuel consumption that is indicative of fire effects. A map of cumulative heat release complements estimates of ground cover constituents derived from post-fire hyperspectral imagery for mapping immediate post-fire ground cover measures of litter and mineral soil. We also present one-year and 10-year post-fire measurements of overstory, understory, and surface conditions in a longer-term assessment of site recovery. At the time, the Cooney Ridge Fire Experiment exposed several limitations of current state-of-science fire measurement methods, many of which persist in wildfire and prescribed fire studies to this day. This Case Report documents an important milestone in relating multiple spatiotemporal measurements of pre-fire, active fire, and post-fire phenomena both on the ground and remotely.

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Thermal Remote Sensing of Active Vegetation Fires and Biomass Burning Events

Cited by 39 publications

References 115 publications

LSA SAF Meteosat FRP products – Part 1: Algorithms, product contents, and analysis

LSA SAF Meteosat FRP products – Part 1: Algorithms, product contents, and analysis

Impacts of changing fire weather conditions on reconstructed trends in U.S. wildland fire activity from 1979 to 2014

The Cooney Ridge Fire Experiment: An Early Operation to Relate Pre-, Active, and Post-Fire Field and Remotely Sensed Measurements

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