Accurate Mapping of Daily and Sub-Daily Wildfire Growth Using Satellite Observations

Fire research and management applications, such as fire behavior analysis and emissions modeling, require consistent, highly resolved spatiotemporal information on the progression of wildfire growth. Sonoma Technology developed a new fire mapping method that uses quality-assured sub-daily active fire/thermal anomaly satellite retrievals (2003-2020 MODIS and 2012-2020 VIIRS data) to develop a high-resolution wildfire growth dataset. This dataset includes growth areas, perimeters, and cross-referenced fire information from agency reports. Satellite fire detections were buffered using a historical pixel-to-fire size relationship, then grouped spatiotemporally into individual fire events. Sub-daily and daily growth areas and perimeters were calculated for each fire event. After assembly, fire event characteristics, including location, size, and date, were merged with agency records to create a cross-referenced dataset. Our satellite-based total fire size shows excellent agreement with agency records for MODIS (R2 = 0.95) and VIIRS (R2 = 0.97). VIIRS-based estimates show an improvement over MODIS for fires with areas less than 4,047 hectares (10,000 acres).
<br>
The novel spatiotemporal resolution and methodological consistency of our dataset enables advances in applications related to historical fire-weather analysis, fire-weather modeling, characterizing wildfire growth potential, historical/future smoke modeling, and near-real-time fire monitoring. We are currently incorporating fire detection data from geostationary satellites in the method to derive hourly fire growth information.
<br>
This work is published in the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1071/WF22048" target="_blank">International Journal of Wildland Fire</a href>.