Mapping the daily progression of large wildland fires using MODIS active fire data

Sander Veraverbeke,James T Randerson,Fernando Sedano,Brendan M Rogers,Simon J Hook,Yufang Jin

doi:10.1071/wf13015

Abstract

High temporal resolution information on burnt area is needed to improve fire behaviour and emissions models. We used the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) thermal anomaly and active fire product (MO(Y)D14) as input to a kriging interpolation to derive continuous maps of the timing of burnt area for 16 large wildland fires. For each fire, parameters for the kriging model were defined using variogram analysis. The optimal number of observations used to estimate a pixel’s time of burning varied between four and six among the fires studied. The median standard error from kriging ranged between 0.80 and 3.56 days and the median standard error from geolocation uncertainty was between 0.34 and 2.72 days. For nine fires in the south-western US, the accuracy of the kriging model was assessed using high spatial resolution daily fire perimeter data available from the US Forest Service. For these nine fires, we also assessed the temporal reporting accuracy of the MODIS burnt area products (MCD45A1 and MCD64A1). Averaged over the nine fires, the kriging method correctly mapped 73% of the pixels within the accuracy of a single day, compared with 33% for MCD45A1 and 53% for MCD64A1. Systematic application of this algorithm to wildland fires in the future may lead to new information about vegetation, climate and topographic controls on fire behaviour.

Highlights

Landscape fires release large amounts of particulate matter and trace gases into the atmosphere, and global estimates of carbon emissions from fires range between 1500 and 3500 Tg carbon per year (van der Werf et al 2010)
Within individual fire perimeters the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) active fire detections generally result in a discontinuous distribution with many gaps (Fig. 3a)
This study presented a kriging interpolation to construct continuous fire progression maps from MODIS active fire data at a moderate spatial scale (500 m)

Summary

Introduction

Landscape fires release large amounts of particulate matter and trace gases into the atmosphere, and global estimates of carbon emissions from fires range between 1500 and 3500 Tg carbon per year (van der Werf et al 2010). Existing bottom-up inventories for wildfire emissions traditionally assess emissions from individual fires using maps of the final outer perimeter, average over multiple fire perimeters in large areas (e.g. the Wildland Fire Emission Information System, French et al 2011) or have coarse spatial resolutions (e.g. 0.58 in the Global Fire Emission Database version 3 (GFED3), van der Werf et al 2010). As a consequence, these models may not be able to capture day-today variation in weather and fuel moisture during fire events, which in turn may bias estimates of combustion completeness and emission factors (Boschetti et al 2010; van Leeuwen and van der Werf 2011), and propagate into larger emissions uncertainties. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) has become one of the primary instruments for moderate-resolution fire remote sensing since it was launched on the Terra satellite in 1999 and on Aqua in 2002

Results

Discussion

Conclusion