HR: 1340h
AN: A13B-0116    [Abstracts]
TI: Reconstruction of Fire Spread within Wildland Fire Events in Northern Eurasia from the MODIS Active Fire Product
AU: * Loboda, T V
EM: tloboda@hermes.geog.umd.edu
AF: University of Maryland, Geography Department, University of Mryland 1104 LeFrak Hall, College Park, MD 20742 United States
AU: Csiszar, I A
EM: icsiszar@hermes.geog.umd.edu
AF: University of Maryland, Geography Department, University of Mryland 1104 LeFrak Hall, College Park, MD 20742 United States
AB: Russian boreal forests have been reshaped by wildland fire for millennia. While fire is a natural component of boreal ecosystems, it impacts various aspects of the environment and affects human well-being. A significant progress has been made in mapping burned area from satellite imagery, which provides consistent and fairly unbiased estimates of fire impact on areas of interest at multiple scales. Although the information provided by burned area products is highly important, the spatio-temporal dynamics of individual fire events and their impact are less known. Often fires occur over large remote areas with limited access, which makes their ground-based observation difficult. In high northern latitudes of Northern Eurasia, MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) makes up to four daily observations from each of the Terra and Aqua satellites. Here we provide an approach to reconstruct the development of fire events based on active fire detections from MODIS. Fire Spread Reconstruction (FSR) provides a means for characterization of fire occurrence over large territories from remotely sensed data. Individual fire detections are clustered within a GIS environment based on a set of rules determining proximity between fire observations in space and time. FSR determines the number of fire events, their approximate size, duration, and fire spread rate. FSR clusters were compared to burned scars mapped from Landsat7/ETM+ imagery over Yakutia (Russia). While some smaller burn scars were found to be formed through a continuous burning of a single fire event, large burned areas in Siberia were created by a constellation of fire events incorporating over 100 individual fire clusters. This in part explains patterns of burning and regrowth observed within large burn scars and difficulty of end of season automated burn scar mapping. Our FSR approach allows for the analysis of fire spread as a function of land cover, fire season, fire weather and other parameters. These parameters help to identify phenomena and conditions enhancing fire propagation and therefore creating high fire danger conditions. FSR is currently applied for an AVHRR (Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer) and MODIS fire product intercomparison and validation effort within Northern Eurasian regional GOFC/GOLD Fire network. FSR identified fire spread as one of the error sources for mapping burned areas from active fire products. It is also used to identify the points of ignition for individual fire events in spatio-temporal domain for fire danger and fire threat modeling.
DE: 1615 Biogeochemical processes (4805)
DE: 1640 Remote sensing
SC: Atmospheric Sciences [A]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting