Project Funding: 2011 - 2014

NRA: 2009 NASA: The Science of Terra and Aqua   

Funded by NASA

Abstract:
Continental and global scale fire products derived from moderate to coarse spatial resolution satellite data have become an important source of information for the multiple user communities involved in fire science and applications. There is however a demand for systematically generated higher spatial resolution burned area data sets, that, until the recent USGS 2008 free Landsat data policy, could not be met at regional to continental scale due primarily to data cost and data availability constraints. This proposal will develop a multi-temporal methodology to fuse the MODIS active fire and burned area products with Landsat data to map burned areas at 30m on a temporally rolling basis. To demonstrate the fusion methodology, we will generate and validate wall-to-wall 30m burned area dataset of the conterminous United States (CONUS). This fused MODIS-Landsat burned area dataset will be generated for 4 years (2002, 2007-2009) and will define several 30m data layers including the approximate day of burning, if a MODIS or Landsat ETM+ active fire detection was present, and the pre- and post-fire normalized burn ratio. The research will build on the proposer’s extensive experience developing the NASA funded MODIS burned area and the Web Enabled Landsat Data (WELD) products. Continental scale validation will be conducted by systematic comparison with the fire perimeter vectors provided by the USGS Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity project. The fused MODIS-Landsat 30m burned area dataset will be distributed through the University of Maryland Global Landcover Facility to enable user community evaluation. This modest proposal, with detailed proof of concept, provides an unprecedented opportunity to support the needs of several NASA programs and the needs of the fire science and applications communities. It will demonstrate the potential for fusion of the NPP/NPOESS VIIRS active fire product with reflectance data sensed by the Landsat Data Continuity Mission sensors that will be launched later this decade.

Publications:

Boschetti, L., Roy, D. P., Justice, C. O., Humber, M. L. 2015. MODIS-Landsat fusion for large area 30 m burned area mapping. Remote Sensing of Environment. 161, 27-42. DOI: 10.1016/j.rse.2015.01.022

Sparks, A. M., Boschetti, L., Smith, A. M. S., Tinkham, W. T., Lannom, K. O., Newingham, B. A. 2015. An accuracy assessment of the MTBS burned area product for shrub-steppe fires in the northern Great Basin, United States. International Journal of Wildland Fire. 24(1), 70. DOI: 10.1071/WF14131

2011 NASA Carbon Cycle & Ecosystems Joint Science Workshop Poster(s)

• Satellite Image Automatic Mapper (SIAM) - A first-stage preliminary classifier for automatic two-stage Land Cover classification and Change detection   --   (Andrea Baraldi, Luigi Boschetti, Chris Justice)   [abstract]

More details may be found in the following project profile(s):

• NASA Terrestrial Ecology (TE) Project Profile