MODIS Rapid Response Applications

• Fires
• Floods
• Land
• Oceans
• Outreach
• Air Quality
• SensorWeb
• Ice
• Direct Broadcast

If you have additional questions, contact the MODIS Rapid Response Outreach Coordinator.

Fire managers can access daily maps showing the locations of active fires in the conterminous United States and Alaska. The United States Forest Service's Remote Sensing Applications Center produces daily regional fire maps based on MODIS Rapid Response Data. The maps are distributed through the National Interagency Fire Center, which coordinates all the national and regional fire agencies across the United States. The maps are used to allocate firefighting resources during the fire season. The Rapid Response staff also supplies the Forest Service with science software to generate rapid fire products from the MODIS data collected regionally by their Direct Broadcast antenna.

The Remote Sensing Applications Center also provides maps of recently burned areas to the Burn Area Emergency Response (BAER) program, a program within the United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service. BAER uses MODIS imagery and fire maps to determine the extent to fire damage in planning to restore fire damaged areas.

The Web Fire Mapper at the University of Maryland provides access to current and archived fire locations detected by the MODIS Rapid Response System through an interactive ArcIMS interface with an extensive database of region-specific layers and ancillary information.

The Global Observation of Forest and Land Cover Dynamics (GOFC-GOLD) user community can access MODIS Rapid Response fire location data to make fire maps of any region of interest in the world. Many international science and natural resources management groups access MODIS fire data through GOFC-GOLD. The UN Global Fire Monitoring Center also provides MODIS-based fire data for the international fire community.

SIAM-SERVIR, the Mesoamerican Monitoring and Visualization System is an online data archive and distribution system for free satellite imagery of Mesoamerica designed to educate people about regional ecological issues and provide decision support tools. The MODIS Rapid Response Team provides daily images of Central America during the dry fire season to support personnel involved in environmental monitoring and disaster management. The fire images are available here.

The MODIS Rapid Response System has been instrumental in developing a fire alert system used by Eskom, the South African power company, and Conservation International. Fire was cutting into the South African power company’s ability to operate. In an average year, more fires burn in Sub-Saharan Africa than any other part of the world, and some of these fires caused power outages. Fires burning near transmission lines can cause outages when f lames ionize the air around the lines, breaking down the normal isolating properties of air. These conditions cause power arcs or surges on the lines, and the transmission protection system shuts down momentarily and recloses the breakers to restore the power. The result is a fluctuation in power that causes havoc in electronic equipment and certain manufacturing plants. Power outages also occur when air pollution rising from the fires pollutes the system’s insulators. When the polluted insulators get wet in fog or light rain, short circuits and the same fluctuations in power occur. Approximately 20 percent of the outages experienced in South Africa in any given year could be blamed on fires. So when the South African government bought a direct broadcast station through which they could receive MODIS data the moment the satellites passed overhead, Eskom was quick to set up a fire early warning system. In cooperation with NASA, the University of Maryland, and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Eskom installed the MODIS Rapid Response System software to help them get fire locations from the data quickly.

The system worked, but not everyone who needed the alerts had easy, rapid access to the Internet. The University of Maryland and Eskom developed an alert system that works on cell phone text messages. When MODIS detects a fire, the system automatically sends a text message to both the National Control Manager and the manager of the region in which the fire was detected. The National Control manager can then reroute power away from the affected region to prevent an outage, and the regional manager can send crews out to fight the fire. In 2005, more than 6,147 fires were detected in Eskom right-of-ways, and at least 15 fire-related outages were prevented in one region alone.

With the success of the alert system in South Africa, the University of Maryland set out to expand the system for other land managers worldwide. After getting fire locations from MODIS Rapid Response, the University of Maryland sends an email and text message alert with the fire location to land managers and governments responsible for fragile ecosystems, parks, reserves, and other protected land. The fire locations are also available online from the Web Fire Mapper. As the system develops, daily MODIS images of the protected regions will be generated by the MODIS Rapid Response Team. The images will allow decision makers to see the extent of the burn, which helps remediation planning. The alert system is being developed in collaboration with Conservation International.

A false-color MODIS image taken on January 18, 2004, left, shows flooding in Australia. The Dartmouth Flood Observatory used this image and others collected during the flood period create a map showing the extent of the flooding. The Flood Observatory uses MODIS to observe known floods around the world, and, on a limited basis, detect new floods. The maps they generate are available to governments and relief organizations. For flood detection, the Flood Observatory has defined at least 710 sections of rivers worldwide. Each section is 20 to 30 kilometers in length and 20 to 30 kilometers in width. MODIS monitors the sections, called reaches, to determine the status of each. When water levels rise to flood status, the river can be targeted by higher-resolution sensors.

The Dartmouth Flood Observatory also compiles yearly catalogs, maps, and images of river floods from 1985 to the present, primarily for researchers. The Observatory publishes a comprehensive Atlas of Global Flood Hazard online that illustrates the complete history of river flooding as observed by MODIS since launch. The Atlas is being used by the international insurance industry and by national and local government for assistance in determining flood hazard.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) is using MODIS satellite data to estimate the predicted yield of crops. MODIS provides daily, high-quality, photo-like images that can be used to observe large areas across the world. These images help FAS improve the accuracy and timeliness of the crop yield predictions, which are needed to make decisions affecting U.S. agriculture, trade policy, and food aid. MODIS products allow FAS analysts to distinguish between different crops like wheat and rice and permit analysts to measure other features like surface temperature and snow cover. Analysts can gauge the overall health of agriculture by comparing current data with previous years. MODIS products, first used by FAS in the summer of 2003, demonstrated their utility by helping analysts identify new areas of irrigated agriculture in the Middle East. On August 24, 2003, only the irrigated land was still green in the MODIS image on the left. MODIS collects data twice daily, from the Terra satellite in the morning and the Aqua satellite in the afternoon, which helps analysts observe how events such as fires, volcanic eruptions, floods, storms, or extreme temperatures affect crops. The MODIS Rapid Response System processes and delivers MODIS data to the USDA within three to four hours after it is acquired. FAS posts the data in the Crop Explorer. University of Maryland also provides USDA crop analysts with a web interface for analyzing MODIS temporal composites of vegetation index data.

The United States Air Force Weather Agency and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory have relied on MODIS Rapid Response images to monitor and predict dust storms in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. Dust storms, such as the one blowing over Kuwait and Iraq in this MODIS image from April 16, 2003, can interfere with troop and equipment movement and with aircraft safety. The military is also given access to near-real-time imagery from other areas in the world where weather conditions, snow cover, smoke, fires, volcanic eruptions, and other things could impact military operations. The United States Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory monitor for smoke that might be a health threat. For example, in July 2003, MODIS monitored a plume of toxic sulfur dioxide smoke from sulfur fires burning in Iraq.

The MODIS Rapid Response System also provides data to the Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) program. The program is a collaboration of agency, institute, and university partners designed to monitor aerosols, liquid or solid particles suspended in the atmosphere. AERONET is a worldwide network of ground based sensors that monitor the air for aerosols to understand the impact of aerosols on climate change. The MODIS Rapid Response system provides daily near real time imagery of the sensor sites here. By comparing satellite and ground-based observations, scientists can learn how aerosols reflect and absorb light and can validate satellite-based aerosol observations. This will improve the tools scientists use to monitor aerosols over the entire Earth.

The MODIS Rapid Response System plays a central role in NASA's SensorWeb. The SensorWeb project seeks to tie the array of NASA sensors currently orbiting the Earth into a virtual web of sensors, so that when one sensor detects an event, it automatically alerts the other sensors in the web to record the event. Because the Rapid Response System can locate a fire within a few hours after the satellite flies over it, MODIS is used as a trigger sensor. When MODIS sees a fire, it will send the location information to other sensors, so that they can target the area to collect additional information.

Without SensorWeb, someone on the ground has to interpret the data from MODIS, and then program the other sensors to monitor the event--a time-consuming process. SensorWeb has the potential to provide data about a fire from multiple sensors within 24 to 48 hours verses the typical 14 days for pre-planned observations.

SensorWeb was used in October and November 2003 when MODIS detected massive wildfires in Southern California. On November 2, MODIS data taken while the fires burned was used to target the Hyperion and the Advanced Land Imager, high-resolution instruments on the Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite, to collect highly detailed images of the newly burned areas. All of this information was sent to the USDA Forest Service to make Burn Area Emergency Response Maps.

In December 2004, the MODIS Rapid Response team began producing daily images of the Ross Sea in Antarctica for Raytheon Polar, which supports the U.S. Antarctic Program. The images are being used to plot new courses for the Coast Guard icebreaker and fuel and cargo ships bringing supplies to McMurdo Station, the American research station on Antarctica. In December 2004 and January 2005, three massive icebergs, the largest of which measured 129 kilometers (80 miles) in length, surrounded McMurdo Sound. The largest, called B-15A, trapped sea ice in McMurdo Sound, changing the conditions in which the ships normally navigate. Daily images are crucial to chart a safe course around the drifting icebergs and through the sea ice that covers McMurdo Sound. The images are also being used by scientists who are tracking the movement of the icebergs.

The Canadian Ice Service also uses MODIS images to chart out the daily ice conditions in the lakes, bays, and ocean around Canada.

A small group of MODIS Rapid Response users have stations to receive MODIS data directly from the Aqua and Terra satellites. The MODIS Rapid Response team provides code to allow these users to process images quickly. In Australia, the Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) uses the Rapid Response fire code to monitor for fires. The CSIR Satellite Applications Center in South Africa also has a direct link to the MODIS data. They use the data to watch for fires, particularly around power lines. In the United States, the University of Alaska, Fairbanks has a direct broadcast system. Because of its northern location, the station can collect data from the satellites several times daily, which means that they get data more quickly than most other locations. This is particularly valuable in monitoring for fires.

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