Abstract ID: 540

GOES WF_ABBA: Building an ongoing database of high temporal resolution fire detections

The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) series has had the ability to detect and characterize biomass burning since the launch of GOES-8 in 1995. The Wildfire Automated Biomass Burning Algorithm (WF_ABBA) was under development for several years before being run operationally by NOAA/NESDIS starting in 2002. Over that time algorithm development has continued and the WF_ABBA has improved and expanded its detection abilities as well as ability to characterize instantaneous fire size (IFS), instantaneous fire temperature (IFT) and fire radiative power (FRP). Recently the WF_ABBA also added improved metadata that allows for tracking why individual pixels were not labeled as fires, such as opaque clouds, block-out zones for sunglint, and so on. This data allows for correction of the diurnal cycle of fire detections for places and times where fires could not be detected, which allows the construction of a high quality climatology of fires in the western hemisphere since 1995. A system was built to reprocess all GOES data with the newest version of the WF_ABBA. A description of how the WF_ABBA works as well as first results of the reprocessing effort will be presented, with specific focus on the LBA study region.

Session:  Fire - Fire, drought, and changes in vegetation structure and composition

Presentation Type:  Poster