Active fires from MODIS and VIIRS and developing the associated Earth Science Data Record

Principal Investigator: Dr. Ivan A. Csiszar

University of Maryland, Department of Geography

Co-Investigator: Prof. Christopher O. Justice

University of Maryland, Department of Geography

Co-Investigator: Dr. Louis Giglio

Science Systems and Applications Inc.

The MODIS Active Fire Products are widely used by both the global change research and fire applications community. This project is to support three major activities associated with the continued NASA provision of satellite active fire products. The first set of activities is to continue the maintenance of the MODIS Active Fire Products generated from the Terra and Aqua instruments. This will include routine science quality assessment and any product refinement needed as a function of validation activities and aging instrument performance and updating code changes in the MODIS active fire Direct Broadcast code. The project will complete the MODIS Terra product validation using ASTER data.

The second set of activities is to continue the evaluation of the VIIRS Active Fire EDR, identifying and implementing improvements to make the product suitable for global change research, with the aim of providing dynamic product continuity with the MODIS products, thus contributing to the transition of MODIS research capabilities into the operational domain. These first two activities were in part previously funded under separate MODIS and NPP Science Team proposals.

The third activity will be to design and initiate a NASA Active Fire ESDR using data from multiple instruments, based primarily on data from MODIS and VIIRS. We will also evaluate the scientific value added, feasibility and cost of extending the ESDR retrospectively, using global data from other satellite sensors, e.g. the AVHRR and (A)ATSR.