Synthetic GOES-R Imagery of Agricultural Burning and Forest Wildfires

Synthetic imagery for the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-R (GOES-R) Advance Baseline Imager (ABI) of fire events have been produced at CIRA. This satellite is planned to be launched in 2015 and will have a footprint size of 2 km along with images every five minutes. Synthetic GOES-R imagery will serve as proxy data for use in fire detection algorithm testing and development. Included in this dataset are synthetic images at 2.25, 3.9, 10.35, and 11.2 µm. Three observed fire events were used to produce the synthetic dataset; two agricultural burning events and one canopy wildfire in the southern California forests. The two agricultural burning events that were used were a Central American case from 4 April 2004 and one from 5 November 2008 over the southern Mississippi valley. The canopy wildfire in southern California occurred on 23 October 2007.

Our efforts have concentrated on producing synthetic imagery with fire hotspots. That is, fire characteristics have been added into an observational operator: Either from agricultural burning or wildfires in forested regions. As a result, ABI synthetic imagery, with a 400 m footprint, has been generated at 2.25, 3.9, 10.35, and 11.2 µm. One consequence of the 400 m footprint size is the ability to build sub-pixel fire signatures for GOES-R ABI. This was done by building ABI pixels of appropriate size using a point spread function. This work is part of the GOES-R risk reduction activities for the GOES-R satellite.

Methodologies of the numerical simulations and conversion of simulated output into synthetic GOES-R ABI imagery, containing fire hotspots, will be discussed. Loops of synthetic imagery containing agricultural burning and forest wildfires will be shown.