HR: 0800h
AN: A51A-03    [Abstracts]
TI: A basin-wide assessment of the GOES and MODIS active fire products for the Brazilian Amazon
AU: Schroeder, W
EM: schroeder@hermes.geog.umd.edu
AF: Department of Geography University of Maryland, 2181 LeFrak Hall, College Park, MD 20742, United States
AU: * Csiszar, I
EM: icsiszar@hermes.geog.umd.edu
AF: Department of Geography University of Maryland, 2181 LeFrak Hall, College Park, MD 20742, United States
AU: Prins, E
EM: elaine.prins@ssec.wisc.edu
AF: UW-Madison CIMMS, 1225 W. Dayton St., Madison, WI 53706, United States
AU: Schmidt, C
EM: chris.schmidt@ssec.wisc.edu
AF: UW-Madison CIMMS, 1225 W. Dayton St., Madison, WI 53706, United States
AU: Setzer, A
EM: asetzer@cptec.inpe.br
AF: Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais, Caixa Postal 515, Sao Jose dos Campos, SP 12245-970, Brazil
AU: Longo, K
EM: longo@cptec.inpe.br
AF: Centro de Previsao do Tempo e Estudos Climaticos, Rodovia Pres Dutra, Km40 SP-RJ Caixa Postal 66318, Cachoeira Paulista, SP 12630-000, Brazil
AU: Freitas, S
EM: sfreitas@cptec.inpe.br
AF: Centro de Previsao do Tempo e Estudos Climaticos, Rodovia Pres Dutra, Km40 SP-RJ Caixa Postal 66318, Cachoeira Paulista, SP 12630-000, Brazil
AU: Morisette, J
EM: jeff.morisette@nasa.gov
AF: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Mail code 614.5, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States
AU: Brunner, J
EM: jasonb@ssec.wisc.edu
AF: UW-Madison CIMMS, 1225 W. Dayton St., Madison, WI 53706, United States
AB: This LBE-ECO Phase III study is designed to assess the performance of active fire products which have been used to delineate the fire dynamics in the Brazilian Amazon basin and which are routinely used to feed biomass burning emissions models for the region. The initial analyses are focused primarily on the creation of a validated long term (1995-present) record for the WF-ABBA active fire product using GOES East geostationary satellite data. Active fire masks were produced for 285 ASTER and ETM+ scenes distributed across the Brazilian Amazon representing our ground truth for the validation of the WF-ABBA. For comparison purposes we also included the MODIS/Terra "Thermal Anomalies" (MOD14) data in our analyses. Approximately 14,500 fire pixels were analyzed for the GOES data and 7,300 fire pixels were analyzed for the MODIS data. We found that at the 50% detection probability mark (p<0.001), the GOES fire product requires four times more active fire area than it is necessary for MODIS to achieve the same probability of detection. However, the higher observation frequency of GOES resulted in less than 40% omission error compared to 80% with MODIS. Basin-wide commission errors for MODIS and GOES were approximately 15 and 17%, respectively. Commission errors were higher over areas of active deforestation due to the high thermal contrast between the deforested sites and the adjacent green forests which can cause multiple false detections. Burnt area estimates were also produced based on ETM+ data to assess the average burnt area size associated with the coarse resolution active fire data above. For this application over 2,700 burn scar polygons were digitized representing all major biomass burning regions across the Brazilian Amazon. Burn scar polygons were then intersected with the MODIS/Terra and Aqua active fire data. 50% of all polygons containing active fires in the MODIS imagery showed a burnt area size larger than 300ha. Burnt areas of less than 100ha in size represented 15% of all cases analyzed. These results are expected to have important implications for fire related studies in the Brazilian Amazon region which rely on satellite active fire data, and more specifically on the GOES and MODIS products. Further work will be pursued to create a unified fire diurnal cycle map that can be used to model time dependent variables (e.g.: emissions). Emission modeling studies will also be addressed at the subsequent phases of this study project by feeding models with the optimized data sets described above.
DE: 0315 Biosphere/atmosphere interactions (0426, 1610)
DE: 0480 Remote sensing
SC: Atmospheric Sciences [A]
MN: 2007 Joint Assembly