Active fire detection and characterization with the advanced spaceborne thermal emission and reflection radiometer (ASTER)

We present an automated fire detection algorithm for the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) sensor capable of mapping actively burning fires at 30-m spatial resolution. For daytime scenes, our approach uses near infrared and short-wave infrared reflectance imagery. For nighttime scenes a simple short wave infrared radiance threshold is applied. Based on a statistical analysis of 100 ASTER scenes, we established omission and commission error rates for nine different regions. In most regions the probability of detection was between 0.8 and 0.9. Probabilities of false alarm varied between 9 × 10^− 8 (India) and 2 × 10^− 5 (USA/Canada). In most cases, the majority of false fire pixels were linked to clusters of true fire pixels, suggesting that most false fire pixels occur along ambiguous fire boundaries. We next consider fire characterization, and formulate an empirical method for estimating fire radiative power (FRP), a measure of fire intensity, using three ASTER thermal infrared channels. We performed a preliminary evaluation of our retrieval approach using four prescribed fires which were active at the time of the Terra overpass for which limited ground-truth data were collected. Retrieved FRP was accurate to within 20%, with the exception of one fire partially obscured by heavy soot.