Hourly Wildfire Growth Database Fusing Polar-Orbiting, Geostationary, and Multi-Agency Observations

Better understanding of wildfire progression and fire behavior is of significant concern for research and fire management communities. Advances in these topics require a long-term, high-resolution dataset. To date, datasets with high spatiotemporal resolution cover limited timeframes, focus on large fires, and/or use a single observation source. We have developed an hourly wildfire growth database for 2012-2022 which includes all fire sizes and fuses polar-orbiting, geostationary, and multi-agency observations. We use observations from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) to expand our prior fire growth dataset, which uses sub-daily active thermal anomaly retrievals from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) aboard polar-orbiting satellites (SNPP and NOAA-20) to produce hourly wildfire growth information. This data is then fused with multiple agency records to provide names, causes, and context. The resulting database provides information on hourly fire growth variability and shows strong correlation with observed relative humidity and wind speed. The hourly dataset is also highly correlated with aircraft infrared measurements. The high spatiotemporal resolution of this dataset provides a significant upgrade compared to current wildfire databases for application areas including fire weather analysis, fire behavior modeling, predicting wildfire potential, smoke modeling, and near-real-time fire monitoring.