JP7.9
WF_ABBA Version 6.5: An overview of the improvements and trend analyses of fires from 1995 to present over the western Hemisphere
Jason C. Brunner, CIMSS/Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, WI; and C. C. Schmidt, E. M. Prins, J. M. Feltz, J. P. Hoffman, and S. S. Lindstrom
The UW-Madison Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS) is reprocessing the GOES-East archive with an updated version 6.5 of the WildFire Automated Biomass Burning Algorithm (WF_ABBA) to generate fire summary statistics and locations of fires throughout the western Hemisphere from 1995 to present. Trend analyses of fires have been generated for this time period. The 14-year diurnal fire climatology will have applications in emissions and air quality modeling, climate change studies, land-use/land-cover change, fire dynamics modeling, fire weather analyses, and socio-economic studies. The WF_ABBA is a dynamic multispectral thresholding contextual algorithm that uses the visible (when available), 3.9 μm, and 10.7 μm infrared bands to locate and characterize hot spot pixels. The algorithm is based on the sensitivity of the 3.9 micron band to high temperature subpixel anomalies and is derived from a technique originally developed by Matson and Dozier (1981). It incorporates statistical techniques to automatically identify hot spot pixels in the GOES imagery. Once the WF_ABBA locates a hot spot pixel, it incorporates ancillary data in the process of screening for false alarms and correcting for water vapor attenuation, surface emissivity, solar reflectivity, and semi-transparent clouds. Version 6.5 of the WF_ABBA provides additional parameters and meta data as requested by the international user community. Improvements include an opaque cloud product to indicate regions where fire detection is not possible; a fire radiative power (FRP) product in addition to Dozier output of instantaneous estimates of fire size and temperature; meta data on processing region and block-out zones due to solar reflectance, clouds, extreme view angles, saturation, and biome type; and fire/meta data mask imagery.
Joint Poster Session 7, Natural Hazards
Wednesday, 14 January 2009, 2:30 PM-4:00 PM, Hall 5
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