A Fully Automatic Instantaneous Fire Hotspot Detection Processor Based on AVHRR Imagery—A TIMELINE Thematic Processor

Potential and Challenges of Harmonizing 40 Years of AVHRR Data: The TIMELINE Experience

Earth Observation satellite data allows for the monitoring of the surface of our planet at predefined intervals covering large areas. However, there is only one medium resolution sensor family in orbit that enables an observation time span of 40 and more years at a daily repeat interval. This is the AVHRR sensor family. If we want to investigate the long-term impacts of climate change on our environment, we can only do so based on data that remains available for several decades. If we then want to investigate processes with respect to climate change, we need very high temporal resolution enabling the generation of long-term time series and the derivation of related statistical parameters such as mean, variability, anomalies, and trends. The challenges to generating a well calibrated and harmonized 40-year-long time series based on AVHRR sensor data flown on 14 different platforms are enormous. However, only extremely thorough pre-processing and harmonization ensures that trends found in the data are real trends and not sensor-related (or other) artefacts. The generation of European-wide time series as a basis for the derivation of a multitude of parameters is therefore an extremely challenging task, the details of which are presented in this paper.

Drifting Effects of NOAA Satellites on Long-Term Active Fire Records of Europe

Explicit knowledge of different error sources in long-term climate records from space is required to understand and mitigate their impacts on resulting time series. Imagery of the heritage Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) provides unique potential for climate research dating back to the 1980s, flying onboard a series of successive National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Meteorological Operational (MetOp) satellites. However, the NOAA satellites are affected by severe orbital drift that results in spurious trends in time series. We identified the impact and extent of the orbital drift in 1 km AVHRR long-term active fire data. This record contains data of European fire activity from 1985–2016 and was analyzed on a regional scale and extended across Europe. Inconsistent sampling of the diurnal active fire cycle due to orbital drift with a maximum delay of ∼5 h over NOAA-14 lifetime revealed a ∼90% decline in the number of observed fires. However, interregional results were less conclusive and other error sources as well as interannual variability were more pronounced. Solar illumination, measured by the sun zenith angle (SZA), related changes in background temperatures were significant for all regions and afternoon satellites with major changes in −0.03 to −0.09 K deg − 1 for ▵ B T 34 (p ≤ 0 . 001). Based on example scenes, we simulated the influence of changing temperatures related to changes in the SZA on the detection of active fires. These simulations showed a profound influence of the active fire detection capabilities dependent on biome and land cover characteristics. The strong decrease in the relative changes in the apparent number of active fires calculated over the satellites lifetime highlights that a correction of the orbital drift effect is essential even over short time periods.

A Spatiotemporal Contextual Model for Forest Fire Detection Using Himawari-8 Satellite Data

Two of the main remote sensing data resources for forest fire detection have significant drawbacks: geostationary Earth Observation (EO) satellites have high temporal resolution but low spatial resolution, whereas Polar-orbiting systems have high spatial resolution but low temporal resolution. Therefore, the existing forest fire detection algorithms that are based on a single one of these two systems have only exploited temporal or spatial information independently. There are no approaches yet that have effectively merged spatial and temporal characteristics to detect forest fires. This paper fills this gap by presenting a spatiotemporal contextual model (STCM) that fully exploits geostationary data’s spatial and temporal dimensions based on the data from Himawari-8 Satellite. We used an improved robust fitting algorithm to model each pixel’s diurnal temperature cycles (DTC) in the middle and long infrared bands. For each pixel, a Kalman filter was used to blend the DTC to estimate the true background brightness temperature. Subsequently, we utilized the Otsu method to identify the fire after using an MVC (maximum value month composite of NDVI) threshold to test which areas have enough fuel to support such events. Finally, we used a continuous timeslot test to correct the fire detection results. The proposed algorithm was applied to four fire cases in East Asia and Australia in 2016. A comparison of detection results between MODIS Terra and Aqua active fire products (MOD14 and MYD14) demonstrated that the proposed algorithm from this paper effectively analyzed the spatiotemporal information contained in multi-temporal remotely sensed data. In addition, this new forest fire detection method can lead to higher detection accuracy than the traditional contextual and temporal algorithms. By developing algorithms that are based on AHI measurements to meet the requirement to detect forest fires promptly and accurately, this paper assists both emergency responders and the general public to mitigate the damage of forest fires.