Five years of GOES WF_ABBA fire products: analysis and applications

The UW-Madison Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS) has completed a 5-year data set of half-hourly GOES Wildfire Automated Biomass Burning Algorithm (WF_ABBA) fire products for the Western Hemisphere. The archive is available on-line at the Fire Locating And Modeling of Burning Emissions (FLAMBE) web site at http://www.nrlmry.navy.mil/flambe/index.html. The data base is being used for a wide variety of applications including aerosol and air quality monitoring and modeling, global change modeling, land-use and land-cover change assessment, emissions inventory analyses, and hazards. In this paper we will present a summary of the diurnal, spatial, seasonal, and interannual variability in biomass burning in the Western Hemisphere from 2000 to 2004 as observed with the GOES WF_ABBA. This summary will include a characterization of the differences between version 5.9 (2000 - 2002) and version 6.0 (September 2002 - present) and the effect on fire detection and trend analyses. We will also present examples of how the data are being used by a broad user community.