Global Geostationary Fire Monitoring System

The international environmental monitoring and scientific research communities have emphasized the importance of utilizing operational satellites to produce routine global fire products and to ensure long-term stable records of fire activity for applications in areas such as land-use/land-cover change analyses, global change research, trace gas and aerosol monitoring, and hazards. Since the year 2000, geostationary Wildfire Automated Biomass Burning Algorithm (WF_ABBA) fire products have been produced for the Western Hemisphere in near real-time every half hour. The GOES WF_ABBA was made operational within NOAA NESDIS in 2002 and is currently integrated into the Office of Satellite Data Processing and Distribution Hazard Mapping System. With the launch of the European Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) platform in 2002 and the anticipated launch of the Japanese Multi-functional Transport SATellite (MTSAT-1R) in 2004, it will soon be possible to generate nearly global high temporal resolution fire products. This paper will provide an overview of the capabilities of each of these platforms for fire monitoring and will discuss future plans for development and implementation of an operational global geostationary fire monitoring system.