The Next Generation Fire System: Delivering Timely and Accurate Satellite-Derived Fire Information

The detection and monitoring of wildfires has become an increasingly urgent problem as more frequent and severe fires have placed people and property at greater risk. While NOAA has been producing operational fire detection and characterization products from geostationary and polar orbiting satellite data for over twenty years, those products were primarily focused on providing input data for smoke and aerosol models and general tracking of overall burning patterns on the scale of days to seasons to years. The current generation of satellites, particularly the GOES-R series of satellites carrying the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI), has enabled much more effective early detection of fires and more consistent tracking of the events due to their improved spatial, temporal, and radiometric performance. As part of the Wildland Fire Program established by NOAA National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS), software designed for alerting users about thermal anomalies from volcanoes has been adapted to include detection and tracking of fires. This system, known as the Next Generation Fire System (NGFS), improves on the existing fire detection and characterization algorithms and provides a common processing platform for the various available sensors, such as ABI and the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on NOAA’s operational polar orbiting satellites. It provides decision support through rapidly generated alerts of fire starts and consistent event tracking in data formats that users can integrate into their workflows, whether they are NWS forecasters, land management agencies, emergency response partners, and others. Improvements, such as generation of fire radiative power (FRP) in many cloudy situations and inclusion of terrain correction, result in fire event information that is more consistent and accurate than currently available. Case examples illustrating the timeliness of the fire detections, the event alerting dashboard, online maps, and more will be explored.