Incorporation of Improved Active Fire Products into NOAA Production Environment

The presentation describes Active Fire products from the Visible Infrared Imaging Spectroradiometer (VIIRS) on the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite and the subsequent operational JPSS (Joint Polar Satellite System) series, as they are implemented in NOAA’s near-real-time pre-operational environment and operational production system. The 750m moderate resolution Active Fire product was implemented in the NOAA’s Suomi NPP Data Exploitation environment (NDE) in March 2016, and currently the operational fire information is used in key NOAA applications such as the NOAA Hazard Mapping System (HMS), eIDEA (enhanced Infusing satellite Data into Environmental Applications) and the High Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) Smoke modeling system. NASA’s 375m imagery resolution algorithm was recently incorporated into NOAA pre-operational environment and provides a near real-time product with improved fire information. After a testing and evaluation period, the 375m product is planned to be proposed for implementation in the NDE operational system. All versions of Active Fire product provide thematic fire mask classification for every pixel in the VIIRS granule and fire radiative power (FRP) for detected fire pixels. Tailoring of the production to the NOAA environment includes preprocessing adjustments to account for the ~86 second input VIIRS granules to minimize product degradation near the edges of the granules. A quantitative assessment of improved detection performance and additional FRP retrievals from the 375m product compared to the 750m product is also done to evaluate the expected impact of the improved VIIRS fire input on key downstream NOAA applications.