Project Funding: 2011 - 2014

NRA: 2009 NASA: The Science of Terra and Aqua   

Funded by NASA

Abstract:
Fire is a major ecosystem disturbance and a widely-used land management tool. It plays an important role in global change, for example by contributing to regional trace gas emissions and impacting air quality. Fire is an agent of land cover change and a land use change indicator. Satellite derived burned area has been identified by the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) as one of the Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) needed in support of the UN FCCC. Data from the NASA MODIS Terra and Aqua satellites are being applied to the systematic mapping of global burned area; the MODIS Collection 5 Global Burned Area product (MCD45) provides a first generation multiyear data records for both research and applications from NASA’s Earth Observing System. The current proposal for Collection 5 maintenance, Collection 6 improvements and global validation of the MCD45 product has the following three components: 1) The proposal will continue to maintain the Collection 5 Product and the Collection 6 product, as the latter comes on-line and perform systematic quality assurance of the product. The proposal team will continue to support the users of the product through maintenance of the MODIS Burned Area Website (http://modis-fire.umd.edu) and will continue to support the distribution of the data through the EOS DIS and the Web-GIS FIRMS system. The ATBD and User Manual for the product will continue to be updated. The proposal team will be represented at the MODIS Science Team and the appropriate Science Measurement Team Meetings. 2) The proposal will provide improvements to the MODIS Global Burned Area Product (MCD45A1) based on Collection 5 QA and Validation, resulting in the second major reprocessing for this product as part of the broader sequence of MODLand reprocessing, known as Collection 6. Planned in the early days of MODIS, a combined active fire - burned area product has now been prototyped for Direct Broadcast application and is used in support of the Global Fire Emissions Database (GFED3). This improvement to the algorithm which will need coding for production, science QA and MODAPS integration and testing, will reduce ambiguous detections and increase the number of small burns identified in the Collection 5 Code; this is important with respect to emissions, for example, from tropical forests, where burning from forest clearing takes place in small clearings. This product will combine the best features of the direct broadcast algorithm and the MCD45A1 Collection 5 algorithm. Collection 6 will be the last planned revision to the MODIS Burned Area Code. 3) The proposal will also implement a CEOS LPV Stage 3 Validation building on the previously undertaken Stage 2 Validation, providing a systematic and statistically robust accuracy assessment and uncertainty analysis of the Collection 5 and 6 product, once the latter reprocessing has been completed. This level of validation will require a significant amount of effort from the team but will be critical for products contributing to GCOS ECVs and the international conventions. As part of this proposal, the validation data set will be made available to the international community. International coordination will be undertaken through the GOFC-GOLD Fire Implementation Team. The proposal will enable team members to participate in the Implementation Team.

Publications:

Baraldi, A., Humber, M., Boschetti, L. 2013. Quality Assessment of Pre-Classification Maps Generated from Spaceborne/Airborne Multi-Spectral Images by the Satellite Image Automatic Mappertm and Atmospheric/Topographic Correctiontm-Spectral Classification Software Products: Part 2 -- Experimental Results. Remote Sensing. 5(10), 5209-5264. DOI: 10.3390/rs5105209

Boschetti, L., Roy, D. P., Giglio, L., Huang, H., Zubkova, M., Humber, M. L. 2019. Global validation of the collection 6 MODIS burned area product. Remote Sensing of Environment. 235, 111490. DOI: 10.1016/j.rse.2019.111490

Boschetti, L., Stehman, S. V., Roy, D. P. 2016. A stratified random sampling design in space and time for regional to global scale burned area product validation. Remote Sensing of Environment. 186, 465-478. DOI: 10.1016/j.rse.2016.09.016

Giglio, L., Randerson, J. T., van der Werf, G. R. 2013. Analysis of daily, monthly, and annual burned area using the fourth-generation global fire emissions database (GFED4). Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences. 118(1), 317-328. DOI: 10.1002/jgrg.20042

Smith, A. M. S., Tinkham, W. T., Roy, D. P., Boschetti, L., Kremens, R. L., Kumar, S. S., Sparks, A. M., Falkowski, M. J. 2013. Quantification of fuel moisture effects on biomass consumed derived from fire radiative energy retrievals. Geophysical Research Letters. 40(23), 6298-6302. DOI: 10.1002/2013GL058232

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

• Activities of the CEOS Land Product Validation (LPV) Sub­group   --   (Joanne Michelle Nightingale, Jaime Nickeson, Gabriela Schaepman-Strub)   [abstract]

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

• NASA Terrestrial Ecology (TE) Project Profile