Fire product development and evaluation in Northern Eurasia  

Ivan Csiszar, Tatiana Loboda, Dmitry Ershov (CFEP), Alexey Mazurov (SRI), Vladimir Belov (IAO), Anatoly Sukhinin (SFI), Sergei Tashchilin (ISTP)

 

  UMD and Russian scientists are partnering to improve the quality and spatio-temporal coverage of biomass burning data in Northern Eurasia. Partner institutions in Russia include the Center for Forest Ecology and Productivity (Moscow), the Space Research Institute (Moscow), the Institute of Atmospheric Optics (Tomsk), the Sukachev Forest Institute (Krasnoyarsk), and the Institute of Solar and Terrestrial Physics (Irkutsk).

 

The key effort of a NASA Land Cover Land Use Change project is the development of an integrated regional fire monitoring system that will provide fire managers, policy makers and scientists with data of known accuracy in a long-term, sustained manner. The UMD fire group is providing MODIS active fire products and processing software. MODIS fire data are distributed with fire products generated at the Russian partner institutions from the precursor AVHRR (Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer). The goal is to facilitate the transition from AVHRR to MODIS and eventually to the Visible/Infrared/ Imager/Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) sensor on the next generation National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) platforms.An a posteriori analysis of satellite-derived burned area and active fire products is carried out to ensure proper quality assessment. The product evaluation is based on air and ground-based field data provided by the Arial Forest Protection Service “Avialesookhrana”, and high resolution ETM+ and ASTER imagery. In a NASA New Investigator in Earth Science project, products from AVHRR and MODIS are compared to ensure the continuity of a long term, multi-sensor historical fire record.

 

This partnership represents the core of the Northern Eurasian regional GOFC/GOLD (Global Observation of Forest and Land Cover Dynamics) fire network.Collaboration with additional partners from Russia, the United States, Canada, Europe and Japan is also emerging. GOFC/GOLD is a major data provider for large-scale international science programs such as the Northern Eurasian Earth Science Partnership Initiative (NEESPI).

 

Example publications: Csiszar I., Loboda T. and Goldammer J., 2003. Contribution of GOFC/GOLD-Fire to fire monitoring in the Russian Federation. Proceedings of the international workshop “New Approaches to Forest Protection and Fire Management at an Ecoregional Level”. Khabarovsk, Russia, 9-12 2003. World Bank and Ministry of Natural Resources of the Russian Federation.